


The Colony

by ntldr



Series: The SARMA universe [8]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24569227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ntldr/pseuds/ntldr
Summary: Acknowledging that an atrocity happened only makes the trauma worse. No matter how much civilian mechs will tell them otherwise, Autobot soldiers are unanimously certain that if they don't talk about what happened, they'll never have to see their friends relive it and fall apart.  Neither Sunstreaker nor Mirage meant to hold a terrible secret.Set in the SARMA comic series by greenapplefreek of deviantArt.
Series: The SARMA universe [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/473221
Comments: 8
Kudos: 48





	The Colony

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the SARMA universe](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/629641) by greenapplefreak. 



Lock-breaking was not one of Sunstreaker’s skills. His programming and training preferred him not to subtly hack a door’s codes and slip it open, but to kick the entire thing out of its frame, hopefully also taking out any threats waiting on the other side. Not to say that he _couldn’t_ lock-break, just that it would take too long and be so likely to fail and sound an alarm that there was little reason for him to make the attempt.

For Mirage, though, lock-breaking was a proficiency.

Much to Hot Rod’s fury.

“Get out of there!” the youngling bellowed from down the hall as he frantically tried to reset the door to one of his many ‘rooms’ with a new password, swiveling his head back and forth from the panel to another door that Mirage had just managed to cycle open.

“And what have we here?” Mirage cooed loudly, leaning into the new room and looking around. “A padded room! For tantrums, I suppose?”

“That’s my bouncing room!”

“The mats do look soft and springy, Little Button. Hmm. Why has no one from the training division thought of this yet for micro-gravity exercises?”

The first door beeped as it locked, and Hot Rod charged down the hallway towards Mirage, flailing his arms to try to shoo him away, somehow successfully as the blue mech backed off to let Hot Rod get to the panel. 

“It’s for _bouncing,_ obviously! Go away!”

Mirage shrugged, then whistled to himself as he crossed the hall, only taking five steps before coming to another door, and then nonchalantly raising his wrist up to the locked panel and tapping on the holographic screen that appeared above his forearm. Hot Rod was so engaged with changing the password for the second door, he missed Mirage working on the third until it beeped and cycled open. The youngling _squawked_ and typed faster, then bolted away from the panel the moment it locked the second door. 

Further down the hall from them, Sunstreaker leaned against the wall and crossed his arms as he watched a renowned noble-mech, espionage agent and assassin scurrying away from an incensed youngling. Hot Rod had broken off from yelling in Cybertronian Standard and was now shouting a few choice words he’d learned on a Cr’oll planet, much to Mirage’s bemusement and amusement. That didn’t stop the blue Autobot from checking yet another door while Hot Rod tried to lock the third.

Sunstreaker was not going to laugh.

He was _not_ going to laugh.

He cleared his vocalizer. Just some static build-up, that was all.

“Mirage, I think he’s had enough.”

“But this is all so interesting!” Mirage protested as he opened the fourth door and took a step inside. “Rocks! Oh my, a whole room of rocks! How qua--Is that a Praxian crystal?!”

“Don’t touch them!” Hot Rod shrieked, throwing himself to shove Mirage and stumbling when the mech easily slipped out of his way. “Sunstreaker, if you didn’t want to bring foreign animals on board, _how come you let him come with us?!”_

“HA!”

...Was that his vocalizer? Slag.

Mirage put a hand over his chestplate as he stepped away from the doorway as if terribly affronted, giving Hot Rod the space to close and lock the door. “A foreign animal?! Young mech, I am _domesticated!”_

“You’re a piece of slag!” Hot Rod snapped. The moment the door to his Rock Room cycled shut and locked, he spun around, moving as if to shove Mirage out of his way, but Mirage was too quick. “And worse, you’re not funny!”

He stormed down the hall towards the large bay running his ongoing projects in _Mighty Mechanics,_ glancing over his shoulder every so often to make sure Mirage wasn’t about to try to sneak past yet _another_ locked door. Mirage raised his palms and showed them to Hot Rod, chuckling as he stepped over to Sunstreaker’s side. 

“Why are you torturing a youngling who already doesn’t like you?” Sunstreaker muttered, low enough that he knew Hot Rod couldn’t hear him.

“He gave me the fastest route to explore your ship,” Mirage replied quietly, still smiling at Hot Rod even as the youngling sneered at him. “You know how long it would have taken me to search the area without having a reason to stick my nose in every room?”

“So you manipulated a youngling into helping you scout _my_ ship.”

“When you put it like that I sound positively villainous.”

The door to the bay area snapped closed and locked. 

Sunstreaker’s engine rumbled. “...And you got him so angry that he left to go play by himself.”

“Also my intention.” Mirage’s tone lowered. “I was hoping to speak to you in private, without him having a chance to eavesdrop. We have more to talk about than just--”

He paused at a drawn-out, metallic _screech._ Both mechs stared at the locked bay doors.

The doors stayed closed. But on the other side was the undeniable sound of a heavy crate being shoved into place in front of it, punctuated by a youngling grunting with effort.

Sideswipe sighed, and Mirage chuckled.

“We have more… _sensitive_ matters to discuss than just the flight path.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“I knew Sigma.” Mirage walked slowly through Sunstreaker’s quarters, optics sweeping over the spartan walls, meticulously organized shelves...and the desktop that finally hinted that there was a youngling somewhere on the ship, covered in unhurried sketches of Hot Rod and notes on his care. “I knew him long before the Decepticon uprising. He donated heavily to the medical corps, oversaw their structuring and their assistance towards the youngling colonies--”

“Must have been where he found Damper,” Sunstreaker growled as he hastily took a seat in the chair in front of his desk, trying to casually lay an arm across some of the drawings to hide them from Mirage’s view.

It was too late. Mirage was looking right at them, and now at Sunstreaker’s optics.

Sunstreaker said nothing.

...And Mirage kept slowly pacing, as if he hadn’t seen anything, his hands clasped behind his back. 

“Actually, Damper was his own youngling, created specifically for Sigma. I never met Damper, but back when we both still lived in the Towers, Sigma was insisting that if he ever had a sparkling he would raise him at home. He could pay for registration, education, programming, anything that the ruling councils would ask him to do. But that didn’t matter when the war broke out; everyone knew that any younglings who showed combat proficiency would be fast-tracked into the Autobots.”

“Like me and Sideswipe.”

“Like you and Sideswipe.” Mirage looked over Sunstreaker’s shelves, but from the subtleties of how his optics tracked Sunstreaker knew he wasn’t actually perusing them. Simply giving himself something to do so that his attention was kept away from Sunstreaker’s desk.

Mirage rarely pushed. He dug, he toyed, he tricked; he was the kind of mech to slip into a place he was not wanted with a few gentle words and could be so charming that he’d be invited back inside the second time he visited. But he understood where not to push, especially with Sunstreaker.

He didn’t want to confront Sunstreaker about the drawings scratched into spare aluminum sheets, as much as Sunstreaker knew Mirage was interested in them. That was part of the reason Sunstreaker had let Mirage into his quarters in the first place, his personal sanctuary on an entire cargo ship mostly claimed by an energetic youngling. 

Sunstreaker kept most mechs besides Sideswipe out of his private life. _Most._

“But Sigma did eventually get his sparkling.”

“There weren’t many left to object to him. The Autobots? Our priority was and still is the All-Spark, the next generation of mechs and femmes that will ensure our species doesn’t die out, not the few bedraggled younglings scattered throughout the galaxy. The councils? They haven’t assembled in vorns. And Sigma oversaw the structuring of the youngling colonies; he had contacts and resources for how to find a sparkling and raise it. Even if someone had found Sigma out, no one in their right cortex would ever say that Damper would have been safe anywhere else than at Sigma’s side.”

The compound on Drega-5 had been near-perfect for a youngling to be raised on, especially with a medical facility nearby. Triage, Sigma’s surgeon and medic, had mentioned that Damper had been beloved at the hospital.

Until it had been blown up. With Damper inside it.

Mirage vented air between his panels as he sat down on the edge of Sunstreaker’s spartan berth, and crossed one leg over the other. “He’s still eating at you.” It wasn’t a question towards Sunstreaker; it was an observation. “Maybe Sigma had the right idea of how to raise a youngling, long ago. But his ideas weren’t as fluid and dynamic as our war has been. Damper would have come into an adult frame as a noble-mech...and likely been killed the moment he left Drega-5. Then Sigma tried to emulate Hot Rod as his youngling, and you proved that he did not have the ability to protect him from a threat."

“I’d like to think that the Decepticons, even a battalion of them, wouldn’t have done as well as I did against him.”

“Did you not tell me that a Decepticon warship had been approaching the planet when you and Hot Rod escaped? If you had not succeeded, those Decepticons would have likely betrayed Sigma and chased him down once they were done looting Drega-5. Hot Rod would either be offline or reprogrammed by now.”

That thought was making Sunstreaker’s tanks curdle whenever it came into his processor. By handing Hot Rod over to Sigma, he’d nearly killed the youngling, or worse, by proxy delivered him right to the Decepticons.

If Hot Rod had been reprogrammed and defected, and Sunstreaker was forced to destroy him in battle...

He would have done so. His programming would have commanded him to do so.

At the cost of potentially ripping his spark in half.

And speaking of that--

“That’s not what’s been bothering me about Sigma.” It was a half-truth; his near-fatal mistake on Drega-5 taunted his cortex if he thought about it too long. Mirage clearly knew it, but didn’t correct him, and Sunstreaker went on. “It’s what Sigma said about Hot Rod and me. That he’s “imprinted” on my programming. He sees what I’m made to do, what I _have_ to do to protect both of us, and he copies me. Sigma said I’ve doomed Hot Rod to be a warrior, and this is during a war where few warriors are held as prisoners and _extinction_ is now plausible.”

“Unless Decepticon cargo ships now come outfitted with standard nanny-bots, it’s not like you had a choice,” Mirage chuckled, but there wasn’t an ounce of teasing in his voice. “It would behoove Hot Rod to know how to fight, now more than ever. Can you honestly say he’s never had to defend himself without you?”

“It’s not just that.” 

Sunstreaker struggled to put how his spark felt into words, and clenched his fists as he tried. Sideswipe had always been better at this than he was. Sideswipe could ramble with a strange mech all day. Sunstreaker preferred to _visualize_ how he felt, except if he could simply level his blaster at the recipient’s head. Usually that message came through clearly.

“...Mirage, you’ve had to assassinate mechs all throughout this war. The Autobots had to teach you those skills when you joined up. I’m assuming there was some sort of programming change when you did that?”

Mirage paused uncomfortably. “...Yes. I was never created with the intention to fight. When the Autobots realized my electro-disrupter was built-in natively and would be difficult to replicate, I underwent several rounds of hardware and programming updates. My frame also had to be completely redone. My friends back in the Towers would hardly recognize me now.”

“But you volunteered for it,” Sunstreaker said, ignoring the melancholy in Mirage’s voice. “I feel like Hot Rod’s not the only one who’s been quietly reprogramming themselves.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s like...whenever Hot Rod is in danger of going offline...and I don’t mean when he’s being stupid and walking on the ship’s wings, or bringing in one of those hundreds of creatures he fragging adores so much, but immediate danger, like when someone has him in their crosshairs, or when he was failing to process energon for several deca-cycles, or when Sigma was flying away with him, I feel like my spark _reacted_ somehow. It felt like everything in me was being overridden with the first priority to protect him, at all costs. The first time it happened, I thought it was just a fluke of my battle programming kicking in and identifying priorities. But now it’s happening when we’re not in fights, like if Hot Rod is about to take a long fall, or eat something Cybertronians shouldn’t.”

Mirage refreshed his optics at him. “This is unusual for you?”

“Something similar happens with me and Sideswipe all the time, but that’s a result of our split-spark, and it’s familiar, identifiable for both of us. I’ve known Hot Rod for a relatively short amount of time. I’ve _never_ had this happen with anyone.” He paused. “...Not even you.”

“Hmph.” Mirage made a show of crossing his arms, as if offended, but the smirk on his face gave him away. 

“I’ve got a good understanding of Cybertronian physiology, but only as related to how best to tear a mech apart, and sometimes how to put them back together again. Mostly the former. This is beyond what I know, and Mirage--”

“Sunstreaker, what you’re experiencing is _normal._ Your spark is reacting to a natural instinct to protect a youngling!”

Sunstreaker narrowed his optics. “Then how come it’s only started recently?”

“Because you’re unfamiliar with a feeling you’ve been denied for most of your existence. You and Sideswipe were made _specifically_ for this war; you haven’t had experience with defending a youngling until now, much less being a guardian. There’s a primal urge in the sparks of nearly all mechs and femmes to keep a sparkling or youngling from harm.”

“Tell that to the multitudes of Decepticons and Neutrals who’ve tried to injure or kill Hot Rod.”

“I didn’t say it was infallible. The urge is _normal._ Imagine if it wasn’t. We Cybertronians would be a short-lived species if we didn’t instinctively protect our young, now would we?”

Sunstreaker wasn’t convinced. “This doesn’t feel like an _urge._ It feels like I’m being driven to immediately--”

“To immediately keep Hot Rod alive. And you said your spark is reacting to Hot Rod being in danger? Your spark and your cortex are agreeing in a split-second that Hot Rod’s safety is in jeopardy and you have to intervene _now._ You’re doing what not only your cortex knows is the right thing, but your spark. Remember Centuri-2? You knew me, but because I appeared to be an active threat to Hot Rod, you were ready to shoot me. Even at the cost of delaying or failing your mission.”

Centuri-2 wasn’t an incident Sunstreaker was going to apologize for, and Mirage knew better than to ask him to do so, though he expected the blue mech to needle him about it whenever he could. “Still doesn’t explain why it came on so slowly, and why it didn’t flick on like a switch the first time I made contact with Hot Rod.”

“I’m guessing Hot Rod didn’t occupy your attention like he does now.”

Sunstreaker didn’t try to object to that. The sketches and notes under his arm on his desk were plenty enough to disprove him.

Mirage leaned forward on the edge of the berth, and his voice became grim. “Also consider this. It was Decepticon _warriors_ who were sent to destroy the youngling colonies. Not just one by accident, not just a few with a purpose, not even a colony of adult civilians. Colonies where the helpless younglings and sparklings _outnumbered the adults.”_

“...I’d prefer not to think about that.”

“As do I. But it’s important to remember that the urge to keep our young safe can be actively ignored, especially by mechs whose programming tells them that they have higher priorities than what everyone else would see as an act of pure evil.”

“And what’s that got to do with me?”

“You’re a warrior too. And yet you’ve decided that Hot Rod deserves as much attention as your mission.” His voice softened. “You have a kinder spark than you let anyone realize, Sunstreaker.”

“...Hot Rod needs a guardian if he wants to survive to adulthood. Not a mech with a kind spark.”

Mirage sighed and shook his head, but Sunstreaker looked away from him. He was done with this conversation.

Still, there was sound logic in Mirage’s idea that Sunstreaker’s spark was behaving in the same way that most everyone else’s did around a youngling, with a delay while he’d been focused on finding Sideswipe and rejoining the war over being more than just a bodyguard for Hot Rod. It made sense, and Mirage had seemed more surprised that Sunstreaker hadn’t recognized it than that it had appeared at all.

But the explanation didn’t sound _complete._ He and Mirage had missed something. It was nagging at him. 

He’d preferred to not think about it anymore. Not when it meant comparing himself to the Decepticon warriors whose programming was so feverishly loyal to Megatron, they’d raze entire youngling colonies for him.

He nearly forgot about it as Mirage tactfully diverted his attention with stories of where Autobots on teams they’d previously had belonged to had gone.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“Ship on the sensor grid!”

Both Sunstreaker and Hot Rod snapped their heads up at Mirage’s verbal warning, and followed his gaze. On a holographic screen that had popped up in the center of the bridge, their cargo ship displayed itself, its statuses, and a matrix of overlapping lines representing the space around it. The signature of another ship, significantly smaller than the cargo ship but still large enough to be a threat, had appeared at the edge of the grid, represented by a simple green dot while the cargo ship rapidly tried to assess it.

Then, as suddenly as it appeared, it vanished.

The two mechs and the youngling held still for a beat, waiting for it to reappear. A second beat. A third.

“...Cloaking device?”

“Definitely way too big to be a sensor ghost,” Sunstreaker agreed with Mirage, before turning his attention to where Hot Rod had leapt out of his chair. “Hey!”

“If it’s cloaked from the sensors, maybe we can see it with our optics!” Hot Rod insisted as he ran to the window on the starboard side of the ship, and smooshed his faceplates against the glass, hands splayed on either side of him. 

“That’s not how cloaking devices work!”

“Little Button,” Mirage tried more gently, “cloaking devices will scramble a ship’s data in visual light, thermal and gamma frequencies. If the ship cannot sense it, your optics definitely will not see it.”

“Maybe the ship doesn’t know to look for when the air shimmers when something is invisible.”

“When the...what?”

Sunstreaker snorted. “It’s part of one of his video games. If an enemy character uses an electro-disrupter, the game prompts him by showing a ‘shimmering’ where the character will next appear. Or footprints where they’re walking.”

Mirage refreshed his optics rapidly. “...Well that defeats the point of invisibility, doesn’t it?”

Hot Rod slapped his palms against the window and kept staring out into the starlit void of space. “Maybe they ran away?”

“Perhaps, Little Button.”

“Stop calling me that!”

“Cargo ships usually travel with an escort,” Mirage said as he took a step backwards, out of Sunstreaker’s field of vision. “Maybe the ship saw us, assumed there was an armed escort somewhere in the area, and decided to vacate before it saw them.”

Sunstreaker moved up to the captain’s chair and took a seat. “Or it’s going to tell its friends about a Decepticon cargo ship moving through the sector and is coming back with a raiding battalion. We should leave.”

Hot Rod peeled himself away from the window. “But what if it’s space pirates?!”

“...You want them to be space pirates?” Sunstreaker stopped typing on the pad on the arm of his chair. “Why in the Pit would you want them to be space pirates?”

“Because then we would fight them and it would be so cool!” 

“Hot Rod--”

“No wait, listen!” Hot Rod hopped forward, pretending to jab at an opponent with an invisible sword. “We’d sword-fight with them! We’d grapple on gangplanks, swing onto the other ship from overhanging wires--”

“In space?”

“--board them, and take the pirate’s treasure for our own!”

“That’s not how space pirates work, Hot Rod.”

The orange youngling was still busy sparring with his pretend opponent. “But there’s a bunch of stories that say that space pirates like to steal and hide their treasure, so it has to be true!”

“If a bunch of fictional stories all say the same thing, that doesn’t make it true in reality.”

“It also says that they put patches over their empty optic sockets, and they replace broken arms with claws and broken legs with pegs, and that they really like to say “aarrg” all the time--AAAH!!”

Hot Rod’s cry snapped Sunstreaker’s agitation into _alarm._ Immediately he was on the look-out for a threat or whatever had injured Hot Rod, especially when the youngling had stopped pretending and was now cowering backwards at an odd angle, one hand guarding the top of his helm.

“What? What happened?”

“Something poked me in the helm!”

...Sunstreaker refreshed his optics, and sat back down in the captain’s chair, only now realizing that he’d leapt to his feet. _Agitation_ returned to his spark while battle protocols whirled down and settled with more than a few grumbles as they returned to standby-mode.

No, wait. The battle protocols hadn’t been the only things re-routing his sub-routines into preparing to defend Hot Rod. His spark had _surged._ Again.

Mirage had better be right that this was him learning to mimick how a mech who _wasn’t_ a warrior would instantly protect a youngling. Pit, even if he was right, he needed to learn to control it. Hot Rod wasn’t totally helpless, and Sunstreaker was going to end up giving his life against a threat Hot Rod could handle himself if he kept jumping to the top of his priorities.

And speaking of Mirage...

“Must be one of those ghosts you’re always talking about.”

Hot Rod squeaked, spinning around in place as he checked all around him. “It’s _planets_ and _sensors_ that’re supposed to be haunted, not _ships!”_

“Uh huh. Probably was actually an organic bug or something that snuck aboard on the last planet. We’ll have to fumigate for it.”

There were no audible footsteps before Mirage breathed into his audial. “You’re still a rude one.”

“And you’re having way too much fun teasing Hot Rod and making it even harder for me to calm him down,” Sunstreaker whispered back, still keeping his optics focused on Hot Rod to not tip the youngling off. Hot Rod was now furiously rubbing the top of his helm, worried that the “stowaway” had left some sort of dropping on him.

“You’ll notice that I don’t shimmer or leave footprints.”

“Because your electro-disrupter is better than a video game character’s. Now stop that, we’ve got work to do.” Sunstreaker tapped a few more buttons on the chair’s pad, then raised his voice so Hot Rod could hear him and would stop worrying over his helm. “We’re about mid-level of the sectors in this cluster, so we have a choice. We could go to the lowered-numbered sectors, which have more details of explored planets and documented flighted paths, but will definitely have more Cybertronian activity. Or we can go into the higher-numbered sectors, documented from afar but still mostly unexplored, especially this spiral galaxy in the 80’s.”

Hot Rod’s fingertips still kept scratching at the top of his helm as he walked back to Sunstreaker. “The ship goes in more directions than just ‘up’ or ‘down.’”

“Yes, but each section isn’t measured in equidistant cubes. The boundaries of the sectors are nebulous and in areas of space where there is nothing but _space.”_ A few more taps, and the hologram of the cargo ship vanished as the view zoomed all the way out, stars rapidly becoming little more than dots, some flying alone, some clustered together, and most coalescing into a large spiral galaxy dominating the higher sectors of the map. “For example, this spiral galaxy has so much… _stuff_ in it that it takes up most of the sections in the 80’s. But this area over here, with a few stray stars and planets, takes up a single, much larger section.”

“Cliffjumper was headed towards the 80’s quite some time ago.” Visible once again, Mirage stepped around the side of Sunstreaker’s chair, as if he’d been quietly standing behind it the whole time. “He was looking to pick up B-127’s trail. Little Button, do you have an itch on your helm?”

Hot Rod grimaced at him, then grasped one hand in the other, stopping himself from checking the spot any more. “He’s trying to find him in that huge galaxy?”

“A herculean effort. But Cliffjumper has never been one to shy away from an insurmountable challenge.”

Sunstreaker snorted and crossed his arms. The corners of Mirage’s mouth twitched up, and Hot Rod looked at the two mechs for a further explanation, but they both ignored him.

“B-127’s mission was to secure a planet with plentiful Cybertronian resources for a new base.” Sunstreaker’s fingers tapped his forearm armor. “But there’s no guarantee that he survived, let alone established a base.”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Mirage replied with a quick glance at Hot Rod. “Autobots who knew about B-127’s mission may be preemptively trying to follow him to populate the base.”

“Before they even know where they’re going? Before Cliffjumper reports back?” 

The swirls of the spiral galaxy were mesmerizing, beautiful, and somehow soothing. But just because it was magnificent didn’t mean that it held any significant Autobot presence. There was no suggestion that this would be anything more than a huge maze of stars and planets to become lost in, when what he needed was the next clue to find where Sideswipe had gone. He doubted either B-127 or Cliffjumper would know anything, if they even could be found.

His spark felt eased by watching the slow rotation of trillions of stars. It wasn’t in the same way that he felt when the other half of his spark was close. That was him simply admiring its grace and majesty-

He grunted as the sudden weight in his lap yanked him back to reality.

“You should plug in the map that you got, see what it says!” Hot Rod was already scrambling over Sunstreaker to get to the hidden pocket in the side of the chair, too impatient to wait for Sunstreaker to do it himself.

“I got it, I got it!” Sunstreaker snarled and pulled open the compartment himself, grabbing the chit before Hot Rod could. “Don’t you touch this! If you break it, we’ll never get another one like it!”

“I know how to plug in a chit, I’m not stupid.” Hot Rod squirmed around to try to make himself comfortable, then yelped as Sunstreaker pushed him off of his legs. The youngling landed on his feet and stumbled away, cursing, as Sunstreaker leaned forward and plugged the chit into the navigational computer.

The hologram fizzled for a second, then dimmed, allowing a second map to be overlaid on top of it. Lines and shapes intersected the stars, showing labels, diagrams, colored blobs of faction-held areas, common flight lanes, and most importantly...both known and potential Autobot and Decepticon bases.

Mirage whistled and put his hands on his hips. “Sigma did not keep himself ignorant of the war, I see. This is quite impressive.”

“Yeah, and it’s outdated,” Sunstreaker growled. “Once the hospital on Drega-5 was destroyed, the only information Sigma would have gotten of the outside world would have been from passing travelers. Hot Rod and I went to more than a few of these planets that said they’d be populated and were barren by the time we arrived.”

“He was good for nothing, after all that.” Hot Rod’s voice was low.

Mirage’s optic ridges lifted at the youngling. “I heard his surgeon saved your life.”

Hot Rod abruptly whirled on Mirage and bared his dentals at him. “You hear that from Sigma yourself? You hear too what he tried to do to me?”

Instead of reacting angrily to a youngling snapping at him, like Sunstreaker, or shock that venom like that could come from a mech so small, like most everyone else, Mirage grinned at Hot Rod. “And I also heard what Sunstreaker did to rescue you. Crashing into Sigma’s ship at orbital-launch speed, and fighting his way to you through hordes of drones? That should be a story to carry for the rest of your life as one of your adventures. Isn’t adventure what you’re always looking for?”

“...It’s not the one I wanted.”

“The ones that truly test you, the ones that are important, rarely are.”

That gave Hot Rod pause. He’d been clasping his fists in front of him, ready to charge Mirage and try to punch him...but now he seemed at a loss of what to do.

Sunstreaker used Hot Rod’s confusion to interject. “The map’s made our choice clear. There’s only a few points of interest in the higher-numbered sectors in and around the spiral galaxy. Maybe it hasn’t been explored all that much yet, but it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing the Autobots want there, there’s nothing the Decepticons want there. There can’t possibly be anything happening there besides skirmishes.”

It was too bad. With how tightly-wound the arms of the spiral galaxy were, planet-hopping for resources would have been easy. His attention turned to the brighter sections of the map, which showed far more activity in the star clusters in the lower numbers.

“Meanwhile, there’s a bunch of established planets and unions over here. Lots of potential battle lines. A frag-load of resources to fight over. Something has to be happening here.”

“And I thought it was Cliffjumper who liked picking fights!”

Sunstreaker groaned. “Don’t remind me of him anymore, please.”

“Oh, you still owe him credits, don’t you? Credits which you borrowed from me?”

“I would have won them back and repaid you, but he cheated--”

Sunstreaker’s voice trailed off as the map suddenly vanished, replaced by the proximity matrix around their ship again. Another ship had been detected, different than the first one, in a different area than the first one.

It was flying parallel to them. And yet...ignoring them. The two Autobots and the youngling fell silent as the computer hurried to analyze the ship, bringing it from a single blip inside the matrix to a defined ship: smaller than a cargo ship, speedier, less weaponry, meant for speed and cut-and-run attacks. More data came flying in across the right-hand side of the screen.

“...That ship is registered as an Autobot ship.”

Sunstreaker gawked, his optics re-reading the same data that Mirage had, as if it would suddenly change to something that made more sense. “I never changed our signature; we should still be showing as a Decepticon-controlled ship on their screens. Why aren’t they trying to attack us? Or at least follow?”

“They think we’re more heavily armed.”

“This is still a cargo ship, nowhere near as maneuverable as they are. And if they didn’t want to interfere with us, why are they still flying in our sensor range?!”

Mirage had no answers, and stayed silent. For once Hot Rod was quiet as well, just as lost and confused as the two mechs were.

Eventually, the Autobot ship turned away, but not at great speed. They weren’t running away. They were treating the cargo ship as simply another ship passing in the night...ignoring that they were two factions at war. They didn’t try to announce their presence, nor tried to hide. They simply _left._

“It’s heading into the 30’s.”

“Probably towards a base,” Mirage agreed with Sunstreaker. “Ships that small don’t fly far from the base they’re patrolling.”

“Patrolling the airspace for an Autobot base, huh?”

The adjustments didn’t take long. The cargo ship turned away from the spiral galaxy, and followed the same bearing as the Autobot ship.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“I’m picking up a third ship now. No, wait, a fourth. No wait, that fourth one is the same as the first one that we saw!”

Hot Rod’s fingers were flying over his console, trying to make sense of the data that was quickly piling up. Sunstreaker was wisely keeping a safe distance from the planet that was the obvious base of the small Autobot ship, but yet new ships kept popping up on their proximity sensors. And oddly, none of them were trying to hail Sunstreaker, no matter what “flag” they were flying.

And there were “flags” all over the place. Autobot. Decepticon. NAILs. There was even a small but dilapidated Cr’oll ship that limped by, the odd one out among Cybertronian-made ships.

“Is there a major port here that no one’s recorded?” Mirage stood with his hands on his hips as he cocked his head at the yellow-and-green planet in front of them. “It doesn’t make sense for us to have come in with a Decepticon cargo ship and everyone behaves _calmly.”_

“They aren’t calm,” Sunstreaker replied, carefully maneuvering the ship to allow them to quickly turn around if they needed to escape. “They’re ignoring us. They’re letting us see their “flag” signatures, but they’re not attempting to show us bearing or flight intentions to keep ships from crashing into each other. Even in minor ports, ships will start exchanging information when this close.”

And indeed, the ships were barely missing each other. Another Decepticon ship swung hard to avoid an Autobot ship that was speeding towards the planet. Even between peaceful factions, this should have led to a fragged-off captain chasing the other one down, screaming at him for the near-collision. Instead the two ships hurried through their adjustments, and continued on their way.

“What are they doing?” Hot Rod leaned over the console to peer at the ships furiously swarming around each other. “Wait...I think all of the little ships are trying to go back-and-forth between the planet and the bigger ships.”

“I agree, Button.” Mirage pretended not to see the face Hot Rod made at him. He held his chin in his hand as he studied them, and took a slow, deep ventilation. “I...oh. Oh dear.”

“What?”

“Those are the type of movements to be expected when several unrelated teams are _looting_ an area. And with all of them flying different flags..."

It finally clicked with Sunstreaker as well. “Fraggit all. Just what we needed.”

“What? What?!” Hot Rod had spun his chair away from his console. “What are they?!”

Mirage vented heavily. “Well, one might say you two are already pirates as well for stealing a ship and still flying its old “flag,” pretending to be a crew that you aren’t.”

It took Hot Rod a moment to process that.

And when he finally did, he _squealed._

“Pirates! Pirates?! They’re pirates?! That’s a planet full of pirates?!”

“Not a planetful,” Sunstreaker said above Hot Rod, and he kept trying to answer him, even as Hot Rod refused to stop his excited rambling. “There’s just enough ships here to be looting an old base or site. Probably no more than three non-aligned crews, maybe four. They’re all working over each other rather than fight, and they think we’re a fifth crew that just showed up.”

“Thus why they’re ignoring us,” Mirage nodded. “As long as we don’t attack, they think we’re nothing more than weaker scavengers to pick at what scraps they leave.”

“Pirates!! Real space pirates!! Sunstreaker, you’ve gotta hail one right now!”

“Why?!”

“I want to know if they sound like the pirates from the books!”

Mirage laughed, and Sunstreaker groaned and shook his head.

...Until a horrible thought crossed his mind.

It felt like someone had just dropped a rock into his tanks.

“Mirage.” Before the blue mech could respond, Sunstreaker was already slapping in the chit into the main computer. “Mirage, I know what they’re looting.”

Sigma’s map popped up once more. The noblemech had highlighted the points of interest most important to him personally. 

The planet in front of them lit up on the map almost blindingly. 

Sunstreaker didn’t need to pull up the rest of the data. And he didn’t want to. As soon as Mirage’s optics widened, and the same creeping horror dawned on his faceplates, Sunstreaker snapped the chit back out and put it away safely in the pocket of the captain’s chair.

Mirage was on the move towards a console. “We need to pivot to create a better exit window.”

“And to give the pirates the impression that we simply changed our minds,” Sunstreaker agreed, hurriedly tapping on the navigation controls, turning the nose of the ship away from the planet.

“What?! We’re leaving, just like that?!” Hot Rod was out of his seat and jogging to Sunstreaker’s side. “You’re not even going to check what the pirates are doing?! They could have treasure, or booty, whatever booty is, or...Sunstreaker, what did Sigma’s map say this planet was?”

Sunstreaker refused to tell him.

...It didn’t matter.

It took Hot Rod a few seconds to answer his own question.

The youngling was not stupid. Naive, inexperienced, but not stupid in any way, shape or form. And he’d seen Sigma’s map several times. He couldn’t memorize it, but he knew what Sigma had found the most important to show on his map.

“...That’s a youngling colony, isn’t it?” His voice was weak. Disbelieving.

Sunstreaker refused to look at him.

“It is! Sunstreaker, that’s...Sunstreaker, a youngling colony is where _I_ came from! And they’re looting one just like it! A place _just like where I came from!”_

“Once we’re away from the pirates, there’s other planets in this sector we can explore. Hopefully they haven’t bothered to pick clean the neighboring systems--”

Mirage’s engine growled. “Some of the pirate ships have stalled their engines. Sunstreaker, they’re watching us. Maybe they figured out that this cargo ship doesn’t have an escort.”

“Slag. As soon as we’re turned around, full-speed towards--”

Hot Rod’s voice became more shrill and panicked. “Sunstreaker, are you listening to me?! That’s a _youngling colony!_ The pirates attacked it, but there might still be survivors down there! More mechs and femmes like _me!”_

“There aren’t any more,” Sunstreaker growled. “C’mon, turn, turn--”

“Sunstreaker!”

His battle protocols activated, and even though the pirates hadn’t changed course yet, it was common for the protocols to activate anyway at a perceived threat. He didn’t realize his cortex was reacting to a _present_ threat until a small fist struck his chin, snapping his head to the side.

Something split inside his mouth, and he tasted energon, but the damage report that immediately appeared on his HUD indicated that Hot Rod’s best punch wasn’t concerning even where Sunstreaker did not have armor. Still hurt, though. 

“Hot Rod!” Mirage exclaimed, admonished, a hand reaching out but failing to stop Sunstreaker as the golden mech immediately stood up from the captain’s chair, creating less room for Hot Rod to hit him again. Not that it stopped the youngling, who was throwing panicked fists at any open spot on Sunstreaker’s frame, desperately trying to keep his attention.

“There might be more! And you don’t even want to try to help them?! What in the Pit is wrong with you?!”

“What in the Pit is wrong with _you?!”_ Sunstreaker snarled, expertly blocking Hot Rod’s punches with his palms, then catching both his wrists to stop him for good, knowing he was too strong for Hot Rod to twist away. “This infatuation with pirates is going to get all three of us killed if you don’t knock it off right now!”

“This isn’t about the pirates, this is about the younglings you’re going to let die!” Hot Rod screeched, tugging at his hands and grunting as he tried to kick him.

Sunstreaker let the youngling pull one more time...then abruptly released him in the middle of it. Hot Rod tumbled backwards onto his aft and back, and Sunstreaker ignored Mirage shouting again in protest as he towered over the youngling.

“All those youngling were dead _vorns_ before we arrived! I’m not going to risk all of us just to make sure some cold, gray frames aren’t desecrated! That’s slag Autobots were worried about in the beginning of the war, not right now!”

Hot Rod grimaced up at him. “You don’t know that they’re offline until you check! You haven’t even tried to scan for life forms yet!”

“All the other younglings who didn’t escape like you did have been cold for a _long_ time! The Decepticons didn’t just attack your colony, they attacked all of them, all at once, before they had enough time to warn each other!” Sunstreaker’s spark twisted in rage. “Don’t you get it?! _You’re one of the last younglings left alive of our entire species!_ And you want to risk yourself, and me and Mirage, for dead frames from one of the worst atrocities of our war?!”

Whatever Hot Rod was about to scream at Sunstreaker died in his throat. All that managed to come out of him was a quick, cut-off burst of static.

He froze.

Sunstreaker had seen this look on his face before. Early on, orns after Sunstreaker had fixed Hot Rod’s “carrier’s” ship and jumped them to a new planet, an alien bird had dive-bombed the youngling, intent on destroying a possible intruder in her territory. Hot Rod had frozen, uncertain what to do against a creature he’d never seen before, and Sunstreaker had to yank him out of the way as the bird dug its claws into the dirt where Hot Rod had just been standing.

He’d seen the same look when he’d yelled at Hot Rod later about breaking the fuel gauge in the cargo ship. Sunstreaker had been shouting that without a working gauge they wouldn’t know that the ship was about to drift dead in space until the systems were red-lining. Hot Rod had stared at him wide-eyed, both guilty and horrified at what he’d done, and hadn’t felt better until Sunstreaker had done a patch-job to fix it. Of course since then Hot Rod had taken Sunstreaker’s yelling as easily as water slipping past him, but Sunstreaker hadn’t forgotten the look on the youngling’s face when he’d thought he’d killed them.

Hot Rod wasn’t going to die right now, though. Not if they got the ship moving and away from the pirates before they realized they had an excellent target in their sights. Yet Hot Rod was _stricken._

The youngling started to scramble back from Sunstreaker. His optics were still huge, and he was biting down hard on his trembling bottom lip.

It didn’t make sense, and some of the fight went out of Sunstreaker out how _disturbing_ this felt. Hot Rod was used to getting yelled at, from being told to get down out of a tree before he broke yet _another_ limb, to listening to Sunstreaker rant about the latest alien creature the youngling tried to smuggle aboard, to his short and abrupt but _regular_ way that he spoke to him, which may not have always been the best, but Sunstreaker was a soldier, not a nanny-bot. So why was he so upset now?! Because they had to leave a destroyed youngling colony behind?!

Fraggit, Hot Rod knew that the colonies had been attacked. He’d evacuated from one. Everyone knew the colonies had been wiped out and--

Realization struck Sunstreaker so hard that he felt like his spark had stopped rotating.

A small hiss from Mirage’s vocalizer told him that the other Autobot had figured it out at the same time that he did.

...Hot Rod asked questions about Cybertron and Cybertronians all the time. He’d never been to his own home planet. What he knew only came from what little he remembered before he left his colony, or what he read in books and databanks, or _what Sunstreaker told him._

They hadn’t ever discussed Megatron’s order for the youngling colonies to be destroyed.

Hot Rod hadn’t known.

_Hot Rod hadn’t known._

He must have been very young during the evacuation. How could he have possibly known exactly what had happened? And then to know that the same thing had happened at _all_ the colonies?!

Sunstreaker had never attempted to discuss it. He’d thought that he was offering Hot Rod respect and distance by not talking about what must be the most traumatizing thing Hot Rod had ever been through. 

And here he was, telling him now, shouting him down for not realizing _every other youngling was gone._

Hot Rod had managed to shakily get to his feet, and was taking slow steps backwards, away from Sunstreaker. His vocalizer was silent, unable to shout back at Sunstreaker, though his head was shaking slightly, as if trying to deny what Sunstreaker had told him.

Primus Almighty, what had he done?

Doing all he could to settle his spark, Sunstreaker tried taking a step forward. “Hot Rod--”

The proximity alarm nearly scared him out of his spinal struts.

His head snapped back towards the map. Mirage was analyzing the readout the same time, hurrying into the unoccupied captain’s chair as he grabbed for the controls.

“There's three ships that broke away and are moving towards us! All of them are pretty small, but they’re carrying at least five mechs each!”

Three ships of at least five mechs. Fifteen pirates were headed towards a cargo ship of two mechs and one youngling.

Slag.

“Hot Rod, barricade yourself in one of your rooms and--Hot Rod?!”

The youngling was already gone, running off the bridge and out the rear door. And Sunstreaker had no idea if Hot Rod had jumped to obey him that quickly...or was running away from him.

Slag, slag, _slag!_ Not now!

“Hot Rod!”

The ship trembled as Mirage fired the engines and the cargo ship accelerated at a faster pace than its bulk was meant for. Sunstreaker took a second to regain his footing, then glanced between Mirage and the closing door where Hot Rod had gone.

...He could do more to protect Hot Rod _immediately_ by keeping the pirates away from him. 

Sunstreaker ran back to one of the consoles and typed quickly. They were leaving the area surrounding the planet fast, and although the larger ships must have seen them too, only the three smaller ships were following them.

“I’ll bet the crews of the bigger ships are busy trying to pack up what they got off of the colonies before they join the chase,” he said grimly. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be too far out once they’re done and they’ll let the smaller crews follow us while they leave for their home base.”

“Hopefully.” Mirage grimaced as he coaxed more power from the engines. “There’s an advantage of your ship carrying much less weight than the pirate’s cargo ships. They’re slower and if they want to flee, they’re going to need to start fleeing now. But those smaller interceptor ships? They’ll risk abandoning the big ships and their loot for a short time to get even more from hunting us down.”

“Can we outrun them?”

Mirage paused as he checked the distance between them and the pirates. “...Negative. They’re already closing the gap and will be on us before we get to star-hopping speed. And outmaneuvering them is laughable in a ship like this.”

Well, wasn’t that just prime?

Sunstreaker took a slow ventilation, calming himself to let his cortex and battle protocols collaborate on a plan, and as he did so he tasted...energon? His own energon?

He wiped it off with the back of his hand. What a time for Hot Rod to finally listen to his tips on fighting a mech bigger than he was.

“Get as much distance as you can to make sure their cargo ships don’t join in. Then when they’re about a klick away, decelerate and halt.”

“I heard you right? You want to _decelerate?!”_

“I want to stand and fight.” Sunstreaker narrowed his optics at the screen’s images of the three pirate ships. “All those ships have grappling hooks attached. They’re going to attempt to board us no matter what we do. Better that it happens from a stand-still rather than letting their hooks and lines rip this ship apart when we’re moving at different speeds.”

“...You’re about as insane as I remember you.”

“I like my chances better when I get to use my blaster than when I don’t.” Sunstreaker pulled up a smaller blueprint of their own ship on the main screen. Twisting it around, he highlighted the three main doors on the port, aft, and starboard sides of the ship. “The pirates can see these airlocks from the outside; this is where they’ll try to break in and board. And if they’re pirates worth two credits rubbed together, they’ve already got the equipment to do it in breems. So as soon as we decelerate, you and I will cover the port and starboard side doors, and try to repel them.”

“Each of us against five mechs? And with a third group of five mechs coming in from the aft airlock unsupervised?”

“It’s not a great plan, but it’s what we’ve got. They’re pirates, Mirage. You don’t become a pirate and keep well-maintained armor like you and I do. Just keep shooting until they drop.”

“Sunstreaker. The aft airlock leads directly into the main cargo bay.”

Where Hot Rod kept his _Mighty Mechanics_ running nearly constantly, taking advantage of the huge, unused space to play in to his spark’s content. 

The pirates would see it the moment they breached the door. Back on Drega-3, the merchant Sunstreaker had bought _Mighty Mechanics_ from had flippantly guessed that he was friends with a youngling. One of the pirates might come to the same conclusion as soon as they saw the game running, especially with how much Hot Rod had built.

Or worse, Hot Rod had taken Sunstreaker’s order to barricade himself in one of his rooms to mean that he should hide _in the cargo bay,_ and had pushed a crate between him and his escape route, thinking he was blocking intruders coming from the halls, not the airlock.

...Or worse than that, Hot Rod was taking cover in the cargo bay among the creations of his familiar game, not to hide from the pirates, but to hide from Sunstreaker and the revelation he’d just dumped on him. He would be beyond taking orders until it was too late.

_Hot Rod._

“We don’t have a choice,” Sunstreaker reasoned even as he felt his spark surge. “He could have gone to any of his rooms. The port and starboard airlocks are closest to the bridge. If the pirates take control of the bridge, they’ll control the ship, and we’re fragged. We _have_ to hold them off at the port and starboard side, and then we can worry about the ones coming up the aft.”

“Heh. Is that a common problem for you, mechs coming up your aft?”

“How much longer until they’re a klick away?”

“Less than thirty seconds. Sunstreaker, I can see the grappling hooks being readied.”

“Frag it. Decelerate in three, two--now!!”

The ship shuddered and groaned again as Mirage not only cut the engines, but engaged the rear-thrusters. The cargo ship came to a violent stop, then nearly started to go _backwards_ before Mirage cut the rear-thrusters too.

One of the pirate ships didn’t decelerate in time and completely shot past them. But what the interceptor ships lacked in strength, they made up for in speed and maneuverability. It was already beginning to turn around, circling to get to the cargo ship’s aft, and the other two ships were saddling up to the port and starboard side airlocks. The rattle of the cargo ship’s automatic weaponry didn’t seem to phase them as they dodged their way inside the firing range, easily finding the blind spot directly in front of the airlock.

Mirage leapt out of the captain’s seat and followed Sunstreaker, who was transforming his arm-cannon as he sprinted for the main hall. “Good luck.”

“We’ll need more than luck, but thanks,” Sunstreaker grunted. “Hot Rod! Wherever you are, lock yourself down and stay hidden! They’re coming in at any second!”

There was no answer from any of the rooms that he and Mirage ran past. Most of them were already locked, thanks to Mirage’s earlier teasing. 

Maybe that would help them. The pirates would have to lock-break or knock down all these doors if they decided to search for Hot Rod.

...If he and Mirage died, maybe there’d still be hope for Hot Rod. A youngling could be worth a lot--

No. He was not going to let it come that.

At the next branch, Sunstreaker ran right, and Mirage ran left. A few minutes later he was at the portside airlock, which already had a faint glowing orange circle on its edges, with muffled, shouting voices beyond. 

Someone was trying to literally _melt_ the door off its frame.

Sunstreaker took cover behind a support beam, aimed his cannon at the airlock door, and waited.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Moments later, a similar orange circle appeared on the frame of the aft airlock. Steam swirled up from it, twisting and curling up to the ceiling, mushrooming and dissipating away in the high-ceilinged room, but not before creating some cloud cover on the highest skyscrapers that Hot Rod had managed to build.

There came a _thud._ A second one. A third.

The fourth _thud_ was coupled with a roar, and the center of the door abruptly separated from the circle that had been carved into it. It crashed to the ground, and as the orange circle began to cool to a dull brown, five beings crept through the smoke into the bay, carefully not to touch the still-hot metal.

One of the pirates whistled as she looked around the colorful virtual landscapes. “Well, I’ll be. Haven’t seen this much work in _Mighty Mechanics_ in vorns. Somebody’s been busy.”

“Ain’t none of it real,” another pirate hissed, a heavy rifle gripped tightly in his hands. “Can’t sell jack that don’t exist! Ain’t nothin’ but pretty lights an’ blocks!”

Clawed feet scraped against the metal floor.

“Something created all this. Something that was _bored._ Something that’s been lurking down here a long time.”

The other four pirates shrank back from a large femme who stepped to the front. The three claws on each of her feet tapped on the tiles as she slunk forward, the scaled plates of her long neck hissing as she swept it back and forth. 

“Something...something these mechs didn’t want to be found. Something _valuable._ Spread out.”

She snapped her fingers, and the pirates immediately dispersed, moving in all directions.

The overhead lights of the cargo bay had long since been turned off; the colorful projections from _Mighty Mechanics_ provided just enough ambient light to see, though not well, and none of the pirates were about to go looking to make the room _brighter_ and give themselves away to the rest of the ship. That did mean the corners were hidden in shadow though, and the pirates carefully searched them with beams of light at the front of their blasters, looking for treasures stored away from prying optics…

Or mechs attempting to hide.

“We know you’re in here,” the tall femme cooed. Her long fingers traced over the top of a digital mountain, the game physics reacting and sending tufts of snow cascading down the slopes. “Have they kept you locked down here, I wonder? Hmm? Hidden away from the rest of the universe? Are we the first new faces you’ve seen in vorns?”

Another one of the pirates cursed as he accidentally bumped into a skyscraper, sending it crashing to the ground, the ‘pieces’ scattering in all directions, some of them fizzling out of existence as the game mechanics determined them to have been destroyed. Several of the other pirates jumped at the digitized sound, along with the “wump-wump” sound effect indicating that the player had done something wrong.

“Slag! Dumb piece of...Heatseeker, what’re we even lookin’ for in ‘ere, huh?! You think there’s a bot livin’ in all this?!”

“Not just a bot.” Heatseeker’s lips curled into a smile, baring her pointed teeth. “Oh, not just a bot. Am I right, little one?”

“...Little one…?”

The other femme raised her head up. “You think there’s a youngling in here?!”

“Look around. You think mechs flying from battle to battle had time to create all this?” She cocked her head towards the door at the far end of the room leading to the hallways. “Watch that. Make sure it doesn’t try to sneak out.”

The second mech tried to protest. “Heatseeker, the other teams--”

“Here, _scraplet, scraplet, scraplet._ You’re worth so much more than all the loot down on that planet, aren’t you? That’s why they’re keeping you hidden away. I wonder how they found you. I wonder how much they’re thinking of _trading_ you for.”

Her intent clear to the other four mechs, they kept searching, poking and searching crates, stepping carefully around pillars, shining bright lights at any place a youngling could attempt to hide. Their shadows curled around the walls, thin and long, like fingers dragging through the metal plates. 

One of mechs froze, then stepped forward quickly, aiming his light at the base of a support pillar. 

“Aha!”

He swung around it...and pointed his light at the bare tile floor.

“...Could have sworn I heard something…”

“What?” Another pirate stepped up. “Whatcha got?”

“Saw a couple of blue optics looking back at me. Or, I thought I did.”

There was a metal _ping_ from further up the pillar. Both pirates immediately pointed their light beams up towards the beams stretching from pillar to pillar.

A shadow scurried away from them.

But more concerning was a long rope hanging over the edge of the beam. One end was dangling down the floor, just in front of them.

Both of them followed the line down, curious...and found that each of them had stepped into a tied loop of the rope on the floor. A noose.

There was a grunt from further down the support beam. The shadow dropped towards the floor, and the noose abruptly tightened around their ankles.

Both pirates screeched as their feet were whipped out from under them and their heads smacked against the floor, their frames moving upside-down towards the ceiling while the shadow acting as a counter-weight kept pulling them along.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Hot Rod found a problem with his plan halfway down to the floor. The momentum of his jump from the support beams had added extra force to the rope yanking the two pirates towards the ceiling, but they weighed more than him, and he was decelerating. In a second gravity would go back to work, pulling more on the two full-sized than a single youngling, and would yank him back up.

So much for swinging from rafter to rafter to duel with space pirates.

Hot Rod let go of the rope.

He still had a long drop to the floor, but he’d fallen out of enough trees to know how to curl up as he hit the ground and roll through his fall. It _hurt,_ but his HUD didn’t indicate any major damage other than his spinal struts being jarred.

The two pirates, meanwhile, had no way to catch themselves after being suddenly thrust upside-down, and went screaming headfirst into the floor. Hot Rod winced as both of them hit the tile with a sickening _crunch._

He had no time to freeze.

The noise had snapped the attention of the other three pirates right at him. He squinted away from the three light beams aimed directly at him, highlighting his orange and red paint, and he sprinted towards the crates closest to the hallway door.

“Don’t shoot it!” one of the femmes yelled at the same time that the other two pirates opened fire. Lasers squealed through the air and pelted the ground at his feet, leaving burns directly behind his footfalls. Hot Rod serpentined, trying to dodge them, and dove behind one of the crates at the same time that the two pirates finally processed the order not to shoot him.

“It _is_ a youngling, Heatseeker! A little baby youngling!”

Frag you, I’m not little.

But his small size did come to his advantage as he scrambled on all fours behind the crates, moving as fast as he could towards the doors he’d locked behind himself when he’d run into the cargo bay.

Before he could get halfway there, something charged between the crates and the doors, and shined a blinding light directly in his face.

“Don’t you move!”

Hot Rod skittered back, trying to go backwards the way he’d come, but the light beam followed him. Slag. He’d instantly run out of places to hide, and his escape route was blocked.

What now?!

He tried switching gears, huddling down towards the floor as if terrified, his hands over his helm. He faked a shivering fit. “Don’t hurt me. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. I’m scared.”

“You better be--”

“Back off! Put your fragging guns away, he ain’t got the weaponry to hurt you!” The male pirate was moving towards the other side of the crates, cutting Hot Rod off if he tried to go backwards any further. “Ain’t that right, kid? Just stand up, slowly.”

“You cooperate, and we won’t hurt you,” the big femme cooed at him from across the room as Hot Rod slowly got to his feet, pretending to be far more rattled than he actually was. “Bet you’re tired of being locked up down here, aren’t you? Well it’s your lucky day. We’re gonna take you off of this nasty old ship.”

Ugh, that femme had a really long neck. Hot Rod was perfectly fine with organics with long necks; they were amazing and sometimes cute. But on a Cybertronian? _Ugh._

“Really?” He pretended to stare at them wide-opticed, his hands hanging at his sides, one of them subtly reaching into his subspace pocket and grasping Sunstreaker’s knife. “You’d get me out of here?”

All three of them were pointing their lights beams at his face, ruining his night vision, and his optics were having trouble seeing the rest of the room. His pump double-timed, terrified that his plan wouldn’t work. He had been in his _Mighty Mechanics_ room so often, he _thought_ he could find his way to the door panel blind, but what if he couldn’t? And there was still that second femme between him and the panel.

He heard her putting her blaster away, though a light stayed on him. “Absolutely. Primus, you must have been so bored. Come here, kid.”

The shadow moved. She was gesturing for him.

Sunstreaker had been teaching him how to read the stances of other mechs. She seemed at ease now, but her knees were bent and spread slightly, and her feet were planted. She was planning on grabbing him as soon as he got in range.

So? Let her think he was too stupid not to notice.

Hot Rod walked forward, pretending to be in awe of the intruders. “Thanks. They found me down on that planet a vorn ago. I think they were coming back to look for more like me.”

The femme cocked her head to the side. “More of--”

Her split-second of confusion was all that Hot Rod needed.

He ducked down, and charged forward. Her stance would have worked to block bigger mechs, but for smaller ones like him, she’d accidentally made a space between her legs for him to duck through. And as he did, the knife swung out, cutting into a primary line right behind her knee, disabling it, primed energon spraying down her leg and all over the floor.

Just like Sunstreaker taught him.

The femme lost control of her own frame and went down hard into a puddle of her own energon, screaming a curse at him. Hot Rod smacked his hand against the door panel, unlocking it, and scrambled again as the door beeped and slid open.

“Get him! Get him!”

He heard the sounds of blasters being ripped out again. As soon as he was through the door frame, Hot Rod dove left through the hall, away from the range of laser fire, and to the door panel closest to him, shutting the cargo bay door behind him.

He’d just locked it when something heavy banged against it, making him gasp and stumble backwards. There was a _roar_ from the long-necked femme as she kicked the locked door, then yelled muffled orders.

He’d seen how quickly they’d gotten through an airlock. They still had the tools to breach it. That locked door wouldn’t hold them for long. 

Keeping his knife held tightly in his hand, Hot Rod ran for his life.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Blaster fire was reverberating from what sounded like all ends of the ship. The pirates had gotten through elsewhere, and Sunstreaker and Mirage must have been fighting them. But where?! There was too much sound to identify a clear direction, and going backwards would take him right into the pirates he’d just outsmarted.

Hot Rod sprinted past each of his rooms, desperately trying to find one of the Autobots. Hunkering down in one of his rooms wasn’t an option; he’d tried that before in his _Mighty Mechanics_ room and saw how quickly he’d trapped himself in the same area of pirates looking for him. But out in the hallway, he was exposed. Having no options, he kept running forward. 

He had to find Mirage or Sunstreaker; one of them would have a plan. Maybe he could even provide back-up if they were still fighting.

As he came up on an intersection, smoke suddenly billowed out from behind the corner, coming from the starboard side of the ship. Hot Rod skidded to a stop, knife out, unsure if the footsteps he was hearing belonged to an Autobot, or a pirate.

Wait. More than one pair of footsteps. 

Unless Mirage and Sunstreaker had teamed up together…

No. Three pairs. Three!

How many pirates were on board?!

Hot Rod spun around, intent on sprinting back the way he’d come. He’d barely made it one step before the doors to one of his rooms opened up, and a pirate stepped out.

“Cleared this one, ain’t nothing but rocks...hey!”

The pirate immediately spotted Hot Rod and pointed at him with his sword. Instinctive to that pose when he and Sunstreaker spared, Hot Rod held his knife back up at him and crouched defensively.

“Enguarde!”

The pirate balked.

“...Oh, you have got to be kidding me…”

There was movement in the smoke behind Hot Rod. He glanced over his shoulder, and his spark sank.

More pirates. At least three of them.

“Ooh, what’d you find here, Camshaft? I thought all the younglings on that planet were offline.”

Some part of Hot Rod’s cortex that wasn’t running in circles and terrified that he was _surrounded by pirates_ processed that even the pirates knew that the youngling colony was decimated. Did everyone know? Why hadn’t anyone told him?

Why hadn’t Sunstreaker told him?!

The smoldering flame of betrayal that burned at his spark couldn’t control him right now. Not when he was the center of attention of _four_ pirates and surrounded on both sides of the hall. Hot Rod gritted his dentals and stepped backwards, knife still out defensively in front of him, until he felt his shoulders bump a wall.

Maybe if he ducked into a nearby room...no, the pirates had just passed the only door close enough for him to get to before they could react. Frag.

One of the pirates grimaced. “We ain’t gonna kill it, are we?”

“You kidding? None of those bodies down there were worth more than scrap. Now a live youngling, that’s something totally different.”

...Bodies?

Hot Rod felt like he was going to purge. The pirates were advancing on him, trapping him, and even if he stabbed one of them, there was no way he could slip away from the other three.

...At least the universe would be without one more evil pirate if he did a good job before they caught him.

He took a swift intake for a battle cry, which turned into a yelp as his feet left the floor.

All four pirates stopped moving. Their optics went wide, and several jaws hung open.

At first Hot Rod thought that a fifth pirate had caught him; it felt like someone was holding him by his armpits. But as he struggled and twisted around, he found that he was _floating._ No one was behind him, no one was under him.

...He could fly?

_He could fly?!_

Oh Primus, wait until Sunstreaker found out that he could fly, that all this time he’d been a flyer, and that’s why he liked climbing trees so much, it all made sense now…

Wait, wasn’t he supposed to have been burning thrusters if he could fly?!

“Ball up.”

The voice was whispered directly into his audial. Hot Rod refreshed his optics, and the second it clicked in his mind who the voice belonged to, he curled up, tucking his knees close to his chest and crossing his arms over his helm.

There was a grunt from behind him, and then he really was flying, the air whistling past him as he sailed right over the heads of the flabbergasted pirates. He’d been aimed not at the hall he’d come from before, but at the smoke, and his view of the four pirates disappeared as he cannonballed into the smoke.

The ground came up fast and hard, rattling his spinal struts for the second time that orn. This time he hit with far less grace, more concerned about getting as far away from the pirates as his momentum would carry him than about landing on his feet. There were shouts from somewhere behind him as the pirates regained themselves, and as soon as Hot Rod felt his knees on the floor he crawled in the direction the smoke had come from as fast as he could, hiding himself within it.

Metal crashed, mechs grunted, and someone let out a scream that was cut off into a gurgle. Heavy footsteps pounded towards him. Hot Rod stopped moving and stayed curled up, presenting as small as a target as possible inside the smoke.

Somehow, the mech still found him. Or the front of his foot did anyway.

Hot Rod grunted as the mech’s weight fell over him, tumbling down on his other side. Somehow Sunstreaker’s knife had stayed in his hand, and Hot Rod stabbed down hard at the shape in front of him, then backed off, knowing that if he hadn’t gotten lucky and missed something vital, the pirate was about to retaliate.

The mech’s frame jerked, convulsed...then lay still.

Something thick and wet plopped down from the edge of the knife and onto the floor. Hot Rod refused to look at it, and kept backing away until he felt the opposing wall.

In seconds, the fight was over. Footsteps approached through the smoke again, slower this time. Certain and calm.

“It’s alright, Little Button. They can’t hurt you any more.”

“They didn’t hurt me at all!” Hot Rod snapped at the figure in the smoke, putting the knife away and storming towards the voice. “I can’t believe you _threw_ me! What the frell?! I thought that you were against ever hurting a youngling!”

“I am! But I saw no better way to literally eject you from the fight.”

The smoke had now cleared into a haze, and Mirage grinned down at the youngling. But one of his hands was clutching at the small of his back, and yellow sparks were spitting out between his fingers.

“What happened?!” Fury forgotten, Hot Rod tried to run around behind the Autobot, but Mirage held his hand tighter over the wound, hiding it from view.

“A lucky hit, right over my electro-disrupter. I won’t be turning invisible again until it’s fixed.”

It was his only serious injury, but Mirage was not without any other damage. Laser burns and dents marred his armor, and Hot Rod hissed his vocalizer empathetically. Suddenly his spinal struts being jarred by two falls this orn didn’t seem so bad. He’d be sore, but it wasn’t anything that required repairs. 

Actually, considered that he’d now faced one, two...at least _ten_ pirates in the past few breems, he was doing alright.

“Hot Rod? Mirage?”

“Sunstreaker!” Hot Rod cried out at the same time that the golden mech came running down from another intersection. He was damaged as well, but no worse than other battles Hot Rod had seen him in. “Over here! We’re okay!”

“ _Mostly_ okay.” Mirage tapped his fingers over his back. Sunstreaker frowned, then transformed his cannon away so that he could tend to the wound with two hands. In a few seconds Mirage jerked, then sighed in relief, his hand coming off his back as Sunstreaker closed the blue dorsal panel.

“My thanks.”

“It’s not fixed, but I’ve clamped off the lines going to your electro-disrupter. Shouldn’t be registering any further pain until they’re reconnected. How’d you do on your side of the ship?”

“Got overwhelmed and had to sneak past them to blow up the airlock, cutting off their resupply of ammunition. It forced three of them forward, and nearly right into Hot Rod.” Mirage patted the top of Hot Rod’s head. “Luckily, Little Button here is good at thinking on his feet. Or _off_ them. Heh heh.”

“He _threw_ me!”

Sunstreaker’s blue optics stayed on Hot Rod, and the youngling got the feeling he was being scanned for damage. “...Two mechs got away from me on the port side. The rest are dead.”

“We already met one of them. He was searching my rooms when I came this way.” Hot Rod crossed his arms. “How many of them are there? Why are we losing so badly to a bunch of space pirates?!”

“We’re still alive, Button. I’d call that a win until that situation changes.”

“It’s called _the battle is still ongoing_ until the situation changes,” Sunstreaker corrected. “So we’re missing one from my portside group, and at least two from Mirage’s starboard group. And we still have the aft team to worry about.”

“I took out three of them!”

Both Sunstreaker and Mirage refreshed their optics at the youngling. “You did what now?”

“So I was thinking of fighting them by swinging around from the rafter like I said before. But when I tried to pick up two of them with one rope, I realized that I didn’t weigh as much as they did and it wouldn’t work, so I let them fall down instead. Then another one came at me, and I cut through a line on her thigh, so she can’t walk anymore.” It felt odd, giving a debriefing to two seasoned warriors, but they were listening to him, and Hot Rod felt his spark brighten in pride. “Then I locked the rest in the cargo bay--”

“Where we were for only a breem, little one.”

Sunstreaker and Mirage whipped around faster than Hot Rod had thought possible. A blue hand snatched Hot Rod’s arm, shoving him behind Sunstreaker, as the golden mech charged his arm cannon aimed at the pirates coming down the far end of the hall. Mirage stood at his shoulder, extending the wall protecting Hot Rod.

The youngling couldn’t help but to peer around Sunstreaker anyway.

Primus, he _hated_ how long that femme’s neck was. And she walked on clawed feet too, and the sound of those claws hitting the tile just wasn’t _right._ The scales on her neck hissed as she cracked her head left and right, loosening up her servos.

Behind her stood at least four more pirates, all with their blasters pointed at the Autobots. All of them had at least some damage, but none dehabiliting. 

A five-on-three fight. If Hot Rod would even be allowed to fight. Considering how Sunstreaker was poised in front of him, probably not. Five-on-two, with both Autobots already having minor injuries, and Mirage’s electro-disruptor out of commision.

Slag.

Hot Rod kept his knife held tightly in his hand. His rifle was back in the armory, and although it was behind them, it was so far off that by the time he retrieved it and ran back, the fight might be already over. But that also meant the femme knew the extent of his weaponry, which was all he was holding in his right hand.

“Did you find any more on board?” she asked the pirates who had recollected on her.

“None, Heatseeker. Just two Autobots, on a Decepticon ship, with an itty-bitty youngling.”

“I’m not itty-bitty!” Hot Rod yelled around Sunstreaker’s hip. “I took out three of you! How’s it feel that a _youngling_ can beat three of you with just a knife and some rope line, huh?!”

“Hot Rod, _shut up.”_

It wasn’t shouted, but he felt the timber of Sunstreaker’s growl all the way down in his core.

The _betrayal_ that Sunstreaker hadn’t been totally honest with him until this orn reignited.

“You shut up!” he snapped at his guardian. 

Mirage grunted as he and Sunstreaker took slow, measured steps backwards as the pirates continued to advance. “Little Button, now is not the time--”

“No, you shut up too! Neither of you bothered to tell me about what happened to the colonies! If I had known, the _first_ thing I would have asked for was to find one so that we could go looking for more younglings that got lost during the evacuations, like me! But you didn’t! And you haven’t even tried to look!”

“During the evacuation?” The femme raised her optic ridges. “And here I was beginning to think that I was looking at the offspring of two star-crossed lovers.”

Both Sunstreaker and Mirage’s engines _wheezed_ at that. But it didn’t stop them from stepping in time, retreating, until they came to the next intersection.

“Narrow service hall on our left,” Sunstreaker muttered. “Goes into a dead-end. They won’t be able to charge us all at once or flank us.”

“And what’s the problem if that is my youngling?” Mirage shouted at the femme at the same time, covering Sunstreaker’s instructions. “Maybe we’ve already adopted him! Maybe his nose looks so much like mine that we wanted to keep him!”

“My nose doesn’t look like your nose--ah!!”

“Get them!” the femme shouted at the same time that Mirage shoved Hot Rod left through the intersection and he and Sunstreaker skittered backwards, never letting up their formation as a protective wall, even as the service hall narrowed into a space that could barely fit two mechs shoulder-to-shoulder. Sunstreaker was already firing at where the pirates had picked up into a sprint as he cleared the corner, then ran backwards, his free hand gesturing for Mirage to move faster as they tried to get some cover in the service wall’s shallow enclaves.

As soon as they found one, Hot Rod was pushed into it. Sunstreaker crowded in with him, his optics staying forward on where he was repeatedly and rapidly shooting, while Mirage somersaulted to a second, adjacent enclave and followed Sunstreaker’s lead, making any pirate who dared to try to follow them walk straight into unrelenting fire, one laying covering fire while the other reloaded.

In the small space, the gunfire echoed like thunder. Hot Rod stayed crouched down, hands over his audials, unable to see anything of the battle besides Sunstreaker’s back and thighs, the unrelenting flashes of light, and the smoking burns in the floor and walls when shots got too close to the Autobots. Somewhere closer to the dead end was an air vent, but it was too exposed for him to attempt to run for it and crawl in.

“One’s charging! Point-three klicks, point-two…”

“AUGH!!”

Sunstreaker’s shot hit something too close to their hiding place. A frame hit the ground heavily, and Hot Rod squeaked as he skittered back from the noise, his back immediately smacking against the wall. 

As he moved, he found himself not looking forward at Sunstreaker anymore, but backwards. The service hall was meant to only be accessed for maintenance, not leading to any rooms and stopping at a dead-end. And yet…

There was a pair of red optics staring at him from the dead end.

How had a femme that large snaked herself through an air vent so fast?!

Slagging long-necked _freak._

“One circled around through the air vents!” he shrieked, knife coming out again, ready to stab the pirate if it tried to advance on them. 

Sunstreaker immediately twisted around, looking for the new threat. Red optics glared at him from the dark, and as Sunstreaker pulled his cannon around to bear at her, the femme’s own blaster unearthed from the shadows. It was leveled straight at Hot Rod.

Time seemed to slow.

This didn’t make sense. The femme wanted him alive, right? The femme had specifically told her crew not to shoot him, right?!

Hot Rod couldn’t figure out what to do. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. And where was he supposed to go anyway?! This was an enclave, not a room. He didn’t have much space to dodge, especially if she had multiple shots ready.

He saw a flash of light from the blaster.

He saw _gold._

A heavy weight slammed into him, knocking the wind out of his cooling vents. Hot Rod felt the back of his head slap against the enclave’s wall, dazing him for a couple of seconds.

...Is this what being shot felt like?!

Weird. He didn’t feel any pain, besides the bump on his helm, or his spinal struts that were already aching from two hard falls already this orn. Maybe his sensors had been burned out by the shot.

He hadn’t realized he’d squeezed his optics shut.

Hot Rod forced his optics back open...and still saw gold.

The heavy weight was still draped over him. Smoke and sparks fizzled up from penetrated armor.

“...SUNSTREAKER!!”

He’d seen Sunstreaker take worse shots. Pit, he’d seen Sunstreaker _purposely_ throw his arm in front of an incoming blast, burning and damaging his armor but saving himself from anything more than superficial damage. His armor grade was meant to take multiple hits before his vital systems would be endangered.

But not at this close of a range. 

_Not right over his abdomen._

“Sunstreaker!” Hot Rod screamed again, shoving at the frame that was slumped on top of him. “Sunstreaker, get up!!”

Sunstreaker moved...but not under his own power. 

Mirage was suddenly crowding into the same enclave, one of his shoulders smoking from a laser that had hit him as he crossed the service hall. One arm was shoving Sunstreaker, rolling him to give Hot Rod room to squirm behind the blue mech instead as Mirage fired rapidly into the air vent. With even less room to maneuver than the three mechs, the pirate couldn’t even dodge a ricochet, and she shrieked before scrambling backwards, the outline of her frame highlighted with each of Mirage’s shots that hit her or reflective walls around her.

Sunstreaker groaned. He’d ended up laying facing forward towards the front of the hall, and his optics fizzled online, towards where the pirates _should_ have been coming from.

Hot Rod saw the Autobot’s frame tense. His arm cannon was yanked forward, but instead of firing, he grimaced and slightly curled up, instinctively guarding his wound as sparks burst from it again with a stink of ozone.

“Point-three klicks--” he tried to gasp out. Mirage, however, was focused on the air vent, refusing to let up until he was sure the long-necked pirate wasn’t going to attempt to flank them again.

But if no one did anything, they were about to be attacked head-on!

Sunstreaker’s cannon was still generally aimed in the right direction. Hot Rod reached over, grabbing the bigger mech’s arm with both of his hands, and grunted as he raised it up off the floor. He couldn’t see the exact direction without poking his head around the corner, and Sunstreaker was staring right at him, confused as to what the youngling was trying to do--

Until he got it.

“Point-one.” 

Hot Rod braced himself, and Sunstreaker fired.

How in the Pit did Sunstreaker not throw himself backwards each time he fired his cannon?! Sunstreaker’s arm knocked Hot Rod away, but not without a screech of pain from around the corner, coupled with the sound of yet another frame hitting the ground.

That _finally_ got Mirage’s attention away from the vent. The blue mech hissed something that Hot Rod suspected was about to be a new swear in his vocabulary as he returned his focus to the front end of the service hall, shooting at something Hot Rod couldn’t see. There was answering fire, and then one of the pirates howled.

Then...an odd silence. After all the noise of the battle, Hot Rod’s audials felt like they were ringing.

“...Are they--”

“Shh.” Mirage was peeking around the corner, blaster aimed, but no longer fighting. He was ventilating quickly, deeply, trying to cool down his frame.

So was Hot Rod. So was Sunstreaker.

Primus, their own _ventilating_ was that loud? How had Hot Rod never noticed that? Or was he only now hearing it after his audials had been desperately trying to pick up the sounds of any mechs trying to sneak up on them? He could hear his own energon pump, the clicking of the heat sink in Sunstreaker’s arm cannon cooling off--

The rumble of something detaching from the ship.

Both he and Mirage froze. The blue mech’s optics had glanced towards the air vents, then up at the ceiling, expecting some sort of a trick. But when several breems passed and nothing manifested, he breathed a sigh of relief.

“That was one of their ships pulling off. Looks like whichever pirates survived decided they’d rather retreat than keep pushing us.”

“They’re all gone now?”

“We’ll need to sweep the ship, but for the moment, it appears to be so.” Mirage carefully stood up, blaster still aimed down the hallway, still looking for signs of a trick or an ambush waiting for them. “Looks like we offlined multiple--we took down most of the remaining pirates,” he caught himself with a second glance at Hot Rod.

“You killed them all.”

“...We killed them all. Except for whichever ones just left on their own ship. We should leave before the bring reenfor--”

Sunstreaker groaned, gripping his arm as he forced his cannon to transform back into his arm, and then slumped back down to the floor again.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“Hold his legs up, get them up on the table!”

Mirage was more than grateful that Sunstreaker kept a tidy med-bay; Autobot units without dedicated medics were known to let the facilities degrade as they tried to limit the time spent in the room where their comrades were most likely to offline. Perhaps having an accident-prone youngling on board had helped enforce the need to keep supplies organized.

Sunstreaker could do little to assist them as Mirage hefted the larger Autobot’s upper body onto the nearest table, while Hot Rod followed with his legs. Sunstreaker’s dentals clenched with the jar of impact, his hands scrambling to grasp at the sparking wound on his abdomen. Mirage muttered an apology as he threw open cabinets, quickly finding the tools he needed.

Tidy, indeed. Or maybe Sunstreaker had meticulously organized everything in fits of boredom. It would be like him.

“Hands away,” Mirage ordered as he powered up a laser cauterizer, the hot-blue light quickly illuminating the room and casting everything in a neon glow. Sunstreaker had been in a med-bay often enough to immediately follow the order, and Mirage noticed his frame twitch as he manually re-routed vital systems around the wound just before the blue mech got to work.

The extent of the damage quickly became apparent. Mirage kept quiet; there was no point in reiterating what Sunstreaker already knew. 

But Primus, it never got any easier to see the _leaking tanks_ of a mech that was still alive.

“...Is he going to be okay?”

He hadn’t realized how easily tunnel vision had slipped over his optics until he heard Hot Rod’s quiet voice. Mirage’s head lifted, and his spark twisted hard at the look on Hot Rod’s faceplates.

“Of course he’ll be okay. He’s Sunstreaker. This is quite a boring injury for a mech like you, isn’t it?”

Something in the chaotic mess of tubes above Sunstreaker’s damaged tanks shifted. Instead of verbally answering, he nodded and gave a small thumbs-up with the hand closest to Hot Rod.

The youngling didn’t look convinced. 

The mesh of _something_ in the tubes shifted again, and Sunstreaker’s jaw tightened. 

Mirage spoke up. “Hot Rod, I can get him stabilized, but while I’m working we need to get the ship out of this area as soon as possible. We’re an obvious target while floating aimlessly, and the pirates’ larger ships have a general idea of where we are, even if they’ve already left this sector with their loot. I’ve seen Sunstreaker training you on the main control functions. You can help all three of us by getting the ship moving.”

The youngling’s optics didn’t leave Sunstreaker’s frame. “What if you need a hand?”

“Then I’ll use one of Sunstreaker’s. Little Bu--Hot Rod, he’s going to be alright.” Mirage smiled at him. “It looks far more frightening than it actually is. By the time you’re done with a flight path and acceleration, I’ll have most of the hard work done.”

Which would be much easier to do when he didn’t have a pair of worried youngling optics staring at his every move. Hadn’t the poor mechling been through enough this orn?

Still, Hot Rod didn’t move. Up until Sunstreaker swallowed hard, and spoke sharply and gruffly. 

“You’ve seen me...do it a million times. Don’t...glare at me. _Go.”_

“Don’t fragging tell me what to do,” Hot Rod muttered, at the same time that he was turning away. His footfalls quickly turned into a run, and by the time he dodged around the corner into the hallway he was in a full sprint back to the bridge.

The door slid closed automatically behind him.

The nano-second that the lock engaged, Mirage snatched up a bucket from a lower cabinet, and stuck it right next to Sunstreaker’s head. The golden mech immediately turned his face into it and purged up the half-processed energon that had been shunting backwards up his tubes, speckled with black smears of oil as two lines that had been burned open by the laser blast accidentally combined.

“Not the finest mix of colors I’ve seen you produce,” Mirage said humorlessly, letting Sunstreaker’s shaking hands hold the bucket as he returned to the wound and hurried to repair the tanks before anything else corrosive could leak into Sunstreaker’s systems.

“I usually don’t vomit up my paint colors,” Sunstreaker gasped.

“No, you’re usually more graceful than that. Excellent job not fountaining your purge in front of Hot Rod, by the way.”

Sunstreaker tried to put the bucket down on the floor, though it more or less fell and rattled against a cabinet. “Mech’s got to know when to hold it, and aim it.”

“Ah. Then I am also grateful that we’re good enough friends that you did not aim it _at me._ Sunstreaker, what am I missing here? You’re hemorrhaging far more energon than you should.”

“The primary line between my tank reserves and spark was pierced. Mirage...”

“Slag.” Moving with a new urgency, Mirage hurried to seal off the line and check the integrity of the secondary and tertiary tank-to-spark lines. “Who in Primus’s name set your frame up like that?!”

“Ratchet. Sideswipe’s got nicked similarly a dozen vorns back, so after Ratchet fixed him he made a shorter tank-to-spark line for both of us. Presents less of a target, but when it finally does get hit--”

“The whole thing goes,” Mirage finished. Ignoring his friend’s energon staining his fingers, he rushed to get the spark monitor on one side of the table linked to Sunstreaker. 

“Mirage…” Sunstreaker tried again.

“Shush, save your energy for your repair nanites.” Each monitor node beeped as Mirage clicked them in over Sunstreaker’s chest plate, and the monitor displayed more and more data. As he worked, he felt a slight rumble under his feet. The ship was moving. “Hot Rod’s getting us to a different sector, away from the pirates, and you’re going to be out of commission for a little while but you are _not_ going to offline, so I don’t want to hear a word about regrets or any other silly thing your cortex is grumbling about right now.”

Sunstreaker snorted. It didn’t sound _right._ Some of the leaking energon and oil mix must have entered his ventilation system.

“It’s not grumbling,” his voice was weaker than a moment ago, “but I may lose consciousness in a moment from energon loss, and--”

A steady beeping pulse emanated from the spark monitor as it picked up Sunstreaker’s unique spark signature and began to analyze and record it. Mirage grimaced at the readout on the screen.

“Save it for telling me the differences on here between a normal oddity for your split-spark and what it’s actually detecting as wrong.”

“Mirage. _Listen._ I taught Hot Rod a long time ago how to make an emergency landing with this type of ship.”

Mirage paused, and stared at Sunstreaker. His optics refreshed once, twice.

“...Why would that matter if he’s moving the ship further into space and away from--”

The rumbling under his feet suddenly increased.

This wasn’t the ship accelerating further, and this wasn’t the violent movement of it being hit by cannon fire. 

The ship was breaking through a planet’s atmosphere.

“Slag. _Slag!”_ Mirage repeated at a yell as the spark monitor blared an alarm and Sunstreaker’s optics fizzled offline.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The colony’s landing pad was meant for ships even larger than a cargo ship, and yet the ship bounced and nearly careened right off the platform from the heavy landing. The pad’s supports groaned in protest, but held, and the ship’s landing gear slipped only a little further before it came to a stop for good.

The engines were still cycling down as the side door slid open, and an orange youngling jumped to the ground, not waiting for the ramp to roll out instead. As soon as he’d sprinted several feet away from the ship, he transformed into his two-wheeled mode and sped down the pathway leading from the pad to the surrounding warehouses.

There should have been mechs everywhere on these wide roadways. If this youngling colony had been like his own, then the routes closest to the landing pad would be for industrial use, not meant for the younglings, busy day and night as supplies were replenished to a majority population that could not produce anything for themselves yet. All he found were lonely, dusty pieces of equipment parked to the side, some intentionally, some half-hazardly. Some in better shape than others, possibly reused by the pirates until they were abandoned again for a second time when they’d spotted the cargo ship with a Decepticon insignia. 

Many of the building structures were still in good shape. Compared to the length of the war as a whole, the colony had been evacuated a relatively short time ago. But even a relative short time of abandonment showed on the streets and roadways as Hot Rod zoomed by.

The planet had been terraformed to suit the needs of a Cybertronian colony, and without maintenance the native planet life was starting to return, vines weaving across the walls and roofs of metallic buildings, flowers budding up from the cracks in plating. Normally this type of juxtaposition would have fascinated Hot Rod. This orn, his tires smothered the plants peeking up from the ground as he raced down the path, looking for some sign of life, _any_ sign of life.

He thought he _liked_ things that were haunted.

The closer he got to the center of the colony, the worse the devastation became.

Unlike the outer buildings, the central offices closest to the youngling zones had been obviously targeted. Walls were smashed, roofs had collapsed inward, more than one building was now a skeleton after having been burned vorns ago. It was here that Hot Rod slowed, and then finally, _finally,_ began to second-guess the wisdom of running through a colony that had been infested with pirates joors ago. What if they’d laid a trap for the “Decepticons” that came upon them?!

He’d worry about that if he came upon them. There could be survivors here. _Other younglings._ Maybe they’d hidden during the initial attack, and the pirate raiding, and were now resuming their wait for rescue.

...For how long?! He didn’t remember how long it had been since he’d crashed while escaping his own colony, or how long it took before Sunstreaker found him--

No, he couldn’t think about that now. The pirates obviously hadn’t found where the youngling survivors were hiding. They could have started to come out right when the cargo ship had landed.

“Hello?!” Hot Rod called out as he rounded a corner, zipping around debris in the roadway. “Anybody here?!”

No answer.

“I’m not a pirate! I’m a youngling, just like you guys! I came here with two Autobots! They can help us, but you guys have to come out first so I can prove that you’re here!”

Still no answer. No movement, no sound, except for the wind whispering through the holes in the buildings.

What could have caused this much damage to one particular spot, while leaving other expanses of the colony untouched?!

...An orbital strike. Hot Rod had never seen one, but Sunstreaker had talked about them. A ship would hover above the atmosphere over a target and--

**_“None of those bodies down there were worth more than scrap. Now a live youngling, that’s something totally different.”_ **

...No. No, there had to be survivors here. There _had_ to. Not everyone would have been positioned under an orbital strike all at once.

Hot Rod grimly avoided the worst of the burned areas, the edges of the craters of the strike, knowing there would be nothing but destruction beyond those buildings. 

“Hello?! Anyone?! HELLO?!”

No answer.

He was coming up on the youngling zones, the walls and gates that kept younglings from accidentally wandering out into the industrial zones, giving them free range to run around inside instead. He easily passed through the security checkpoint. The gates had been blown open, the security boxes burned into barely recognizable shells. What should have been a major obstruction back in his colony, where he’d had to beg and plead and bribe until giving up and attempting to unsuccessfully scale the wall, now took him seconds to cross.

**_“You want to risk yourself, and me and Mirage, for dead frames from one of the worst atrocities of our war?!"_ **

They hadn’t checked. Nobody had checked this sector for vorns, except the pirates. They might still be here.

Unlike the exterior of the security walls, the interiors were painted in bright, primary and pastel colors, broken up by professional murals from the guardians and caretakers, and graffiti from the younglings that reached only as tall as they did. The youngling zones were made to encourage them to run around outdoors in wide-open spaces, over playgrounds, in gardens, on climbing sets that never seemed quite high enough for Hot Rod and that he had always teetered on the very top until one of the guardians from the security boxes had yelled at him to come down--

No, wait. He’d never been on this playground.

Why did he have clear memories of a playground he’d never been to?

There must have been pre-made plans for the youngling zones across colonies, because he distinctly remembered that support going on _that_ wall, and _that_ pole being the hardest to climb especially when it rained, and beyond it would be a blue-and-red slide...yes, he knew the color of the slide before he saw it just now. It _had_ to be made from the same blueprints.

That would also explain why vivid memories of his own colony were coming back to him. Things he hadn’t thought about in _vorns,_ things he should have forgotten about while climbing alien trees as tall as he dared, of sunbathing as much as he liked without one of the other younglings kicking him, of cold nights trying to keep warm and wishing he was back in the crowded, noisy bunks, of being alone with only his own voice to keep him company until he found a golden mech who had also crash-landed--

It was making his spark hurt and he couldn’t _think._

Find the surviving younglings. That’s what he came here to do, that’s what he had to do while Mirage was busy with Sunstreaker and couldn’t stop him.

As he raced past the dulled, chipped paint on the playground equipment, he did all he could to block out the rush of memories threatening to flood his cortex. The laughter and shouting of other younglings, the chuckling of the caretakers when one of their students did something particularly adorable--

Yet all was silent now, save for the noise of Hot Rod’s own fuel pump pounding in his audials.

Or was it? Primus, he could hear them all so well. He remembered exactly which turns would be the hardest to take as he and his friends chased each other, and at the last second he remembered that in reality he was traveling _at speed in his alt-mode,_ and barely managed to keep from tipping over as he swung around the side of a gazebo meant for outdoor teaching while still providing the younglings some shade. The softly-synthetic gravel under his tires reminded him of a time when he’d slipped on them and fallen at a wrong angle, twisting his arm on the way down, and a caretaker had tutted over him crying and said it would have been much worse when they still used stoney-hard gravel bits instead. His friends had all teased him for that.

He hadn’t _missed_ his friends in so long. Had he really forgotten them all?! What were their names?!

Central Records. Central Records would have their names. It not only kept tabs of all the personnel here, it had general databases about all the youngling colonies. Hot Rod knew because there was once a caretaker who had mixed him up with a ‘Hot Shot,’ and they had to re-identify them both at Central Records to clear up the confusion. The workers there were used to younglings and only a little gruffer than the caretakers, and as soon as Hot Rod’s spark signature was confirmed he was shooed out and back into the youngling zone. Central Records would have kept all that information on him and everyone else in his colony.

But first, he had to find the younglings.

Where would he have gone if the colony were under attack and he needed to hide?

He remembered being pulled against a thick chestplate and hidden under a cloak. He hadn’t been sure _why_ he was being hidden; it wasn’t like he’d been small enough to smuggle out past the security checkpoint. But it had also muffled the sounds of the shouting and explosions--

**_“You’ll be okay, Hot Rod! Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay. You’re a survivor. You’ll be--”_ **

Was that memory from his colony at all?! Had he dreamed that?!

Nevermind. Where would he hide?

Bunks. Bunks were where everybody went when they were in trouble. You hid underneath your bunk, or someone else’s if you had the top bunk. And yet the caretakers always found them--

Didn’t matter. That’s where a youngling would hide. That’s where they had to be.

Hot Rod transformed back to his bipedal mode while still driving, launching himself airborne. He landed on his feet and kept running, forgetting to be proud of how well he stuck the landing as he ran to one of the closest bunk houses, colored just darker than the rest of the zone to encourage recharge, painted with images of sleeping mech-animals and stars on the roofs.

“Hey, I’m coming in! I’m not gonna hurt you! It’s okay--”

He swung open the main entrance door.

And found the younglings.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Central Records. Go to Central Records.

Stupid. He was so _stupid._ Why didn’t he listen to Sunstreaker?! Why did he come all the way back to this planet, back to this fragging _colony,_ instead of listening to him?!

**_“This infatuation with pirates is going to get all three of us killed if you don’t knock it off right now!”_ **

Why didn’t he wait until Sunstreaker or Mirage could have come with him?!

Everything was passing by in a blur. Hot Rod knew his footsteps were taking him to the big office that said ‘Central Records,’ and that he was pushing the half-collapsed doors open. But it was if he were watching someone else pilot his frame for him, while he was trapped running in circles in his own cortex, with voices yelling at him in all directions.

**_“Ooh, what’d you find here, Camshaft? I thought all the younglings on that planet were offline.”_ **

They’d told him. They’d told him, intentionally or not, and he hadn’t listened because he was mad at Sunstreaker for not being the one to tell him until Hot Rod had yelled at him for not turning the ship around. Sunstreaker was wrong for not telling him a long time ago, thus he must have been wrong about the younglings, and thus Hot Rod would have found them all hiding and waiting for rescue?!

Stupid.

The Central Records computer somehow had managed to stay connected to a back-up power supply all this time. Hot Rod knew he was typing on the keyboard, but he wasn’t thinking about what he was typing. The voices were too _loud._

**_“You’re worth so much more than all the loot down on that planet, aren’t you? That’s why they’re keeping you hidden away.”_ **

**_“Must be one of those ghosts you’re always talking about.”_ **

There was limited data on the youngling colonies that weren’t this one, but Hot Rod didn’t need much. The caretakers encouraged younglings to communicate and write letters to each other on other colonies and had little security for this level of access. Thank Primus for that. He was having difficulty figuring out how to work a keyboard as it was while remembering to keep ventilating through hitches.

Hitches?

**_“It’s alright, Little Button. They can’t hurt you any more.”_ **

A few more clicks, and he was looking at a list of the youngling colonies.

There were new, red-marked alerts near the majority of them that he didn’t remember being in the computer before. His own home colony had one of these alerts.

_“Emergency beacon detected. Contact security and administration immediately.”_

Emergency beacon?

Had the colonies been calling to each other for help as the attacks were happening?

**_“The Decepticons didn’t just attack your colony, they attacked all of them, all at once, before they had enough time to warn each other!”_ **

**_“You’ll be okay, Hot Rod! Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay. You’re a survivor.”_ **

He’d been clutching the mech holding him underneath his cloak. The mech had been holding him in return as he climbed into a seat, and seconds later he’d gunfire rattling off of metal.

That was a dream. That was too weird to have ever actually happened.

Hot Rod clicked through to his colony’s files, and then to a personnel list. This too had red-marks, but this time they were all over the page.

_“Colony-wide emergency lockdown confirmed. The following are the results of Autobot Rescue Bots’ roll-call.”_

The colony had done this before, when a youngling or sparkling was missing. Everyone would stay in the zone while the guardians and any other soldiers on the colony did a roll call and a search. Every single time it had turned out the youngling or sparkling had wandered into a place where they shouldn’t have been, and they were found within the joor. Somebody had mentioned that if the youngling was still missing after the entire colony had been searched, security would call for help from the Autobots and the Rescue Bots, but that had never been necessary.

Maybe...maybe the Rescue Bots found something. That’s what they did, right? They rescued. If anybody could find a survivor, they could.

Still trying to get his ventilations back under control, he scrolled down the list.

...It felt like his spark had stopped rotating.

No. No.

_“Carbon. Sparkling Education Specialist. Found offline.”_

_“Biopunk. Youngling. Found offline.”_

_“Darkwing. Sparkling. Found offline.”_

_“Rotorbolt. Youngling. Missing.”_

_“Keeper. Security. Found offline.”_

_“Spasma. Youngling. Found offline._

No. No, no, no, no, no.

Even the voices in his cortex had shut up.

_“Sinker. Youngling. Found offline.”_

_“Dynamo. Youngling. Found offline.”_

_“Hosehead. Youngling Education Specialist. Found offline.”_

_“Siren. Sparkling. Missing.”_

Only one name was marked in yellow.

_“Flatline. Medical Corps Leader. Autobots troops responding to reports of an orbital strike advised Flatline was seen among Decepticon ranks. Current whereabouts unknown.”_

And then they went back to red again.

_“Free Wheeler. Youngling. Found offline.”_

_“Landmine. Youngling Education Specialist. Found offline.”_

_“Boltax. Security. Found offline.”_

_“Hyperdrive. Youngling. Found offline.”_

Then…

_“Hot Rod. Youngling. Missing."_

Hot Rod could read no further.

He must have slipped to the ground, because next thing he knew he was on the floor, pressing his face into his knees and hugging his legs, his ventilations entirely uncontrollable. He must have been cold, because he was shaking hard.

**_“You’re a survivor. You’ll be--HNNG!! You’ll be okay...”_ **

There had been a stink of ozone. The feeling of leaving his tanks behind on the ground as whatever vehicle they were in accelerated upwards, fast, the engines roaring underneath them.

In the dream, he had felt hands grasping him, hugging him, trying to comfort him, the autopilot beeping loudly and declaring a route plotted to the nearest inhabitable planet for emergency landing.

And then the hands grasping him were all too real.

“Hot Rod!! Oh Primus, Hot Rod…”

His feet left the floor as they had only a joor ago when he’d _flown_ right over the pirates invading the cargo ship. This time though, instead of hitting the floor in a ball, he stayed up and was pulled into a tight hug against a chestplate.

“Slaggit all. What were you even doing out here?!”

He was being shushed. He barely heard it, still feeling like he was a witness to his frame being comforted, not the actual one being comforted.

Still, it helped _a little_ to hug a neck and bury his face into a shoulder.

He heard fingers tapping the keyboard of the computer. It beeped, and something was put away into subspace before he felt himself being carried out of the building.

He didn’t recall much of the trip back. He had more important things to worry about. Like how much his spark _hurt._

“It’s alright. Shush now, it’s alright. We’re leaving. You were trying to do a good thing, Hot Rod; you don’t deserve to have seen all this.”

His ventilations just _would not even out._ He hugged the neck even tighter, and felt a hand trying to rub the back of his helm, as if he were a hysterical sparkling being calmed after a crying fit.

**_“Just two Autobots, on a Decepticon ship, with an itty-bitty youngling.”_ **

He wanted so badly to go home. He shouldn’t be here. He should be curled up in his bunk, his small desk of knick-knacks and personal toys above the headrest, while dozens of other younglings snored in recharge around him. 

The warm metal of the chestplate he was pressed against felt nice. He felt his spark reaching for it...then recoiling.

It was nice, but that’s all it was. Just _nice._

He wanted to go home.

Hot Rod shouted that into the bigger mech’s audial, hearing his voice echoing from far away, even though his cortex knew that his demands didn’t make sense anymore. Where exactly was he supposed to go? His abandoned bunk collecting dust, if it wasn’t destroyed?! The alien planet Sunstreaker had found him on?!

Someone was speaking back into his audial, trying both to calm him and make sense of what he was saying. The footfalls changed as they stepped through a metal hallway. The cargo ship.

His spark was writhing. It was alone. It was cold.

He could hear his own voice still yelling into an audial. Sobbing. That was him making that noise? The other mech wasn’t responding now.

The footfalls changed again. They didn’t echo as much anymore. They were out of the hallway, now inside a room.

Hot Rod felt himself being lowered down. This wasn’t his bed; it wasn’t very comfortable, and his blanket that Sunstreaker had managed to find for him was missing. Plus, this one was already occupied by a second, much bigger mech. And the beeping of a spark monitor nearby was annoying.

Still, as he was pulled away from the _nice_ warm metal of a chestplate, Hot Rod couldn’t help a frightened cry, scrambling for something, _anything_ else to hold onto.

The beeping of the spark monitor changed to an alarm.

There was a noise from the first mech, as if he’d stuttered to a stop. “What the--”

Something flopped over Hot Rod. An arm? It blindly snaked around him, then pulled him tight against the chestplate of the mech he was laying against.

And, instantly, it felt way more than _nice._

A powerful, blazing light shone brightly next to his own spark, nearly overwhelming and overpowering him. Yet somehow it was soothing, naturally drawing him in, surrounding him and cradling him, lending him strength. 

The voice was gruff, stern. Yet it was far louder than all the other voices that had been invading his cortex, growling at them to get away from Hot Rod.

 **“You’ll be fine.”** He heard the hiss of the laser tool creating weld lines over his torn plating. **_“Last time I let you try to do maintenance on a rifle alone.”_**

All in his head. It was all in his head. And yet this one was calming him down, angry as it was.

He was safe.

“This is impossible,” he heard the first voice murmur, but it wasn’t in his cortex. And thus it didn’t matter.

He was safe.

He was warm.

He was _safe._

Hot Rod turned his face into the golden chestplate, and let himself sigh as his ventilations finally came back under control.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“I would say it was impossible, if you hadn’t been hooked up to a spark monitor which recorded the whole thing.”

Sunstreaker frowned as he and Mirage analyzed the data together, the former gingerly sitting up on his berth, the latter standing. The screen they were both staring at was very clear that the read-out had not encountered an error, but neither could it make sense of what it had recorded an orn ago.

“See? That’s a ‘flare’ from my spark. I told you that I was reacting to him before, Mirage.”

“I know you did, my friend.” 

Mirage pressed a button on the side of the screen, scrolling through the timeline of data. Sunstreaker’s spark had clearly been ailing from the lack of energon while Mirage had been repairing him. It had settled into his frame’s low-power mode while Mirage had left the ship looking for Hot Rod once Sunstreaker had been stabilized. And then there was a weird _spike_ in activity from his spark, lasting several minutes, then slowing, until a time-stamp that Mirage had noted himself towards the end: _“Hot Rod is now calm and asleep.”_

Mirage kept scrolling back and forth, focusing on the spike, then reevaluating all of the data, then checking any other minor anomalies, as if he could find another clue if he stared at them long enough.

“Is this the ‘imprint’ Sigma was talking about?”

“Can’t be. Hot Rod wasn’t just reacting to my presence next to him. _I_ was reacting to _him._ You still want to tell me what I’ve been experiencing is the normal reaction of someone who wants to protect a youngling?”

“I have been firmly corrected. But I still don’t understand it.”

“Where’s Hot Rod now?”

“In his own berth. In his sleeping room,” Mirage clarified at a pointed look from Sunstreaker. “Poor thing was exhausted, and not a little damaged from the fight. Not as bad as me, and nowhere near as bad as you, but his frame needs time recharge and to do regulatory repairs.”

Though Mirage was certain it was more than just Hot Rod’s frame that needed rest. The youngling had been screaming and absolutely inconsolable when he’d brought him on board, and then just as fast had calmed when Sunstreaker unconsciously pulled him tight against his frame. He’d seen enough that today that would scar an adult mech’s cortex; what must a youngling’s be going through?

Mirage was also grateful he’d been mindful enough to make sure Sunstreaker was still comatose when he slipped a recharging Hot Rod out from under his arm. He’d had to do more repairs on Sunstreaker. Primus knew, in the way Sunstreaker had reacted to the youngling’s cry when he’d first been laid down next to him, he would have stabbed Mirage if he’d been conscious enough to realize the mech was taking him away.

Sunstreaker’s faceplates were tight. “Is Hot Rod--”

“We won’t know until he wakes up, but I assure you, I made sure he was wrapped up in his blanket with a pillow, and a toy I found nearby.”

“He’s going to yell at you for that. Those soft toys are _memorabilia.”_

“My grand-mechs had _memorabilia._ Those toys are simply _old.”_

Sunstreaker held up his hand, stopping Mirage from playing with the monitor further. “The data looks familiar,” he admitted. “When...whenever tests were run on me and Sideswipe, to see how we’d react to each other in distress, our spark activity registered like this.”

Mirage’s optics moved to Sunstreaker, then to the screen, then back again.

“This looks the same? You think that your spark is mistaking Hot Rod’s for Sideswipe’s?”

“Maybe? I don’t know. As I said, I know more about taking mechs apart than how they fit back together. And all I know about youngling physiology has been from trial and error with Hot Rod, with just as many errors as trials.”

“It does fit neatly into this puzzle though.” Mirage crossed his arms, his movement hiding the noise he’d just heard. “You’ve been separated from Sideswipe for a long time now.”

“It’s been...trying to reach out to him.” 

Sunstreaker’s voice was the quietest Mirage had heard from him in a long time. He immediately bit down on what he was intending to say next, silently and respectfully imploring him for more.

Sunstreaker stared at him, and when Mirage did nothing, giving him the space to proceed as he wished or refuse to give him further, he gradually let his frame slump.

“...I know he’s alive. I’d feel it if he wasn’t. I know it. A while back, we were ambushed and I was captured by Decepticons. Hot Rod got away, and once the Decepticons figured out who I was they thought they were looking for Sideswipe too. They tortured me to try to get Sideswipe to respond. It worked. I...I _saw_ Sideswipe, just for a second, ‘hearing’ my spark cry out.”

There was so little information on split-sparks, even with having a pair of them in the Autobot ranks. Mirage was aware that Sideswipe and Sunstreaker had allowed themselves to be studied briefly, and it likely would have continued if they had not been so desperately needed on the front lines. There were rumors that the twins’ sparks could ‘talk’ to each other, but this was the first time Mirage had heard it confirmed from one of them.

And that was after knowing Sunstreaker for vorns.

If Flatline had still been with the Autobots, maybe he would have been able to help. But that mech had been AWOL for vorns.

That thought reminded him of the chip in his subspace pocket, the copy of the data he’d gotten from the Central Records computer behind where he’d found Hot Rod shaking and crying. Autobot High Command would be very interested in that file. Especially considering one of the younglings listed as “missing” on the same file was obviously still alive.

He hadn’t yet told Sunstreaker that he had a copy of that file.

Mirage concentrated on keeping his voice gentle. “Maybe...because you’ve been with Hot Rod for an extended period, your spark is mistaking him as the other half of your spark? You and Sideswipe had been inseparable until now.”

“Better idea. My spark is mistaking to instinct to protect my twin with the instinct to protect Hot Rod. Like you said the other orn. My spark knows he’s a youngling who needs guidance and protection, and it’s...I don’t know. It’s _finally_ figuring out something more than ripping mechs apart, which to me, is everything associated with _Sideswipe.”_

“But that doesn’t explain why Hot Rod visibly calmed when your spark reacted to him. Sunstreaker, it was as if someone had flipped a switch, and he went from being a frightened and hysterical youngling to one being comforted by the proximity of his _carrier.”_

Sunstreaker flinched.

And instantly, Mirage knew the moment was lost. Sunstreaker’s damaged plating slickened down against his frame, his face became hard once more, and his voice returned to a growl.

“And it’ll end the moment that I find Sideswipe. My spark will recognize its other half, and this confusion will be over. My spark will be free of trying to latch onto Hot Rod’s, or whatever the frag it’s trying to do right now.”

Mirage felt sick. “Sunstreaker…”

“Mirage, this whole youngling-guardian thing was never in my base programming at all. Me and Sideswipe...we don’t have it. Our first priority is our mission, and then each other. Everything else takes a far backseat to that.”

“Even a youngling?”

“...There’s a reason they sent in the Rescue Bots to the colonies after they were attacked, and sent me and Sideswipe after the warships that were escaping. Every single one of us fought like we were going to bring those sparklings and younglings back to life if we killed enough Decepticons. That’s what we’re good at. That’s _all_ we’re good at.”

Mirage grimaced. “With all the respect in the universe to you, I hope you have deluded yourself and are entirely wrong. I hope at the end of this…” 

There was no kind way to put this, so Mirage stopped trying.

“I hope at the end of this, you’ll see how far you’ve shoved your head up your own aft.”

Sunstreaker’s optic ridges shot straight up. “...Wow. Well, hoping doesn’t change the reality of the situation. If this is a mistake, then finding Sideswipe is going to fix it, before my spark flares again and I do something stupid and get myself killed throwing myself in front of another laser for a helpless--”

“And if you did, regardless if you died or not, you’d prove my point anyway,” Mirage interrupted. “Just because no one taught you how to care for a youngling doesn’t mean that you’re a poor guardian. If anything you’ve proved your proficiency by _not_ having previous training. You’ve shown yourself to be determined to do more than just keep Hot Rod alive; you want him to _thrive,_ and you’ve had to teach yourself what that definition means and how to bring it about. Throwing yourself in front of a youngling in danger was not a sign of weakness; it was heroism.”

“It’s going to take an Autobot out of the ranks when I’m needed the most!”

“To ensure we have a future after we win this war!” Mirage snapped back, more than a little happy that an injured Sunstreaker was confined to the medical table and couldn’t extend his argument with his fists. “Let me make this more clear to you. If you told me tomorrow “Mirage, I’m leaving Hot Rod and this ship to you to take him to an Autobot base while I go back to trying to find the front lines,” I’d lock you in Hot Rod’s bouncing room until you came to your senses, and/or until we found Sideswipe. You are an excellent guardian, whether you will admit it or not.”

“I won’t, because I’m not that kind of a liar.”

“Then I have nothing more to say to you about it. Get some rest, and if you get up before your repair-nanites complete, I've seen _exactly_ how efficiently Ratchet welds your brother to a medical table.”

He made sure the last part was said cheerfully and with a smile, and he also made sure to quickly make his exit out of the medical bay before the stunned look on Sunstreaker’s face could disappear.

Primus above, he treasured that. Sunstreaker tended to make himself as unbreachable as possible, and it was a delight to not only see him shocked into speechlessness, but be the culprit behind it. Especially when it was the final note in an argument.

As he stepped out the door into the hall, Mirage subtly put a finger in front of his lips, asking for silence. He waited until the medical bay’s door was closed and he’d taken several steps away from the door before speaking.

“I hope you’re feeling better, Button?”

Hot Rod scowled up at him and tightened his hold at the blanket he had draped over his shoulders. “Define _better.”_

“A return of the Prince of Grouchiness! I’d define that as _better!”_

When Mirage had been a youngling in the Towers, many of the noblemechs surrounding him wore elaborate capes and cloaks to indicate their status above the rest of society. Mirage and his friends had liked to imitate this by tying their berth blankets around their shoulders and necks, and then parading around the Towers, much to the delight of the older mechs and femmes.

It hurt his spark to see the harsh, exhausted look on Hot Rod’s face as he accidentally imitated this style, his blanket draped from his shoulders down to the floor and trailing slightly behind him.

Prince of Grouchiness indeed.

Wasn’t this supposed to be the age where younglings were cheerful and social, galavanting around with a sincere thirst for knowledge and adventure? Wasn’t this the age where he himself had gotten in trouble so often for screeching in glee when excited, which was every other moment? Was this the difference between a youngling raised in the Towers, and one of the common masses raised in a colony?

Or the difference of a pre-war youngling and one who had survived an orbital strike on his colony, lived an unknown expanse of time on an alien planet, _alone,_ then been exposed to the horrors of war over and over again as his guardian attempted to find a permanent home for him?

Who was this poor mech who was forced to grow up so quickly?

...He was simply _Hot Rod._ And he _did_ galavant around and jump and screech and cause all sorts of trouble. Just at the moment, he was very, very tired, all the way down to his core and his spark.

“Sunstreaker’s doing better, but he needs his rest,” Mirage told him. 

“Uh-huh.”

“...How much did you hear?”

“I dunno. You definitely heard me coming, you tell _me.”_

Mirage rubbed his chin inquisitively, refusing to let the youngling ire him. “Well, I heard you bump against the wall about the time Sunstreaker was lamenting about his twin, per usual. He does that more often than you’d think. So you missed us recounting our adventures before the necessities of war separated us.”

Hot Rod wrinkled his faceplates. “Sunstreaker was always with Sideswipe, not you.”

“Oh, I was there some of the time too! Certainly not as much as Sideswipe, but I knew them both! How do you think I knew how best to needle Sunstreaker without him threatening violence or yelling at me to leave? It’s an acquired talent.”

Hot Rod’s face was still scrunched up. But there was a new light behind his optics.

Aha.

There it was. 

The insatiable, primal youngling need to be elbows-deep in _trouble._

Don’t press too hard, Mirage. The mechling just had an orn that had threatened to rip his spark to pieces. He’d even dragged his tactile comfort with him out of bed and wrapped it around him like a shell.

“So he’s never yelled at you before?” Hot Rod asked carefully. “Never?”

“Oh no, not never. It’s been after long vorns of being snapped at and threatened, of being told how ignorant I was for the class I belonged in before the war, and of being chucked at and _over_ things to get me to move faster on a battlefield that I finally figured out how to talk to him without him closing up like a startled cybro-turtle. And I’m _still_ figuring him out to this day. Mech likes to keep his secrets.” 

Mirage winked.

“And I’d be such a bad friend if I ever told any of them.”

Now _that_ held Hot Rod’s attention. “You wouldn’t! You’re the mech who holds secrets and pretends he doesn’t know anything about anyone!”

“Of course I know everything, all adults know everything. It’s just a matter of whether or not they’ll taunt that to a youngling so you can prove that they’ve _forgotten_ everything. Like how a rope draped over a support beam can become an excellent trap in the dark.”

“Oh, uh, you found that?”

“I did. Along with the damage those brutes caused to your game. Speaking of things forgotten, it's been a long time since I played _Mighty Mechanics_ back in the Towers. Maybe I can help.”

“...Only if you promise not to build anything stupid.”

Mirage put one hand on his chest plate and held up the other. “Autobot scout’s honor. All I need is direction from the master builder.” He shrugged and spread out his hands. “And if as I build a secret or two slips out of me, then it’s the fault of a youngling distracting me with a good game, totally beyond what I can control.”

Hot Rod snorted at him, but he turned anyway, leading the way towards the cargo bay, this blanket sweeping behind him like Sentinel Prime’s cloak.

“What’s ‘the Towers’ anyway?”

“You truly don’t know?” Mirage’s long strides easily kept him at pace beside Hot Rod.

“What was that a second ago about younglings proving the adults have forgotten everything if they taunt them?” Hot Rod smirked.

“Ah. My mistake. They’re where the nobility and upper classes of Iacon used to reside.”

“Wait, Sunstreaker showed them to me! They’re on the hologram of Cybertron he made in _Mighty Mechanics!”_

Mirage’s optics widened. “Sunstreaker did that for you?! Hot Rod, may we see that first? It would do good things for my spark.”

The blanket fluttered at Hot Rod’s heels as he hurried into a trot.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“Your pirating clan are such vultures.”

“As if you’re any different.” Heatseeker stretched her long neck back and forth. The interceptor ship hadn’t been crowded with her four other crewmates dead, along with another ten from her team. But she’d been cooped up in it for such a long time before a larger, fully-fueled pirate ship had found her. “You’re no better than any of us. You think I’m blind to all these cages?”

“You’re lucky I don’t stick you in one.”

“Why don’t you? You’re finally adopting the pirate code, Lockdown? Giving some respect to the other clans instead of just going it alone all the time?”

The mech grinned, showing off his yellowed dentals. “Some pirate code. The main ship of your crew abandoned you, left you to adrift without fuel when they realized you failed to take whatever ship you were hunting.”

“And I’m grateful that you picked me up. Grateful enough that I’m willing to pay you in the only currency you like.”

“Oh?”

“Information.” Heatseeker grinned back at Lockdown. “You should have found me earlier. Now you’ll have to keep me aboard so I can identify the Decepticon cargo ship we were trying to catch.”

“Why would I care about a Decepticon cargo ship? I don’t hunt for scrap parts like your clan.”

“Wasn’t scrap. This one was commandeered by Autobots that nearly wiped a team of fifteen mechs."

"Nearly."

"I got away, didn't I? First one was blue, skinny, spoke like a Towers brat. Probably worth several thousand credits if he can be traded alive."

"Uh-huh." Lockdown checked his hook-hand. "That all?"

"Oh no. His back-up was a golden mech, frontline. Huge black headfins. Probably his lover, because with them was a--”

"Golden Autobot frontliner?" Lockdown froze. "And the mech with him was blue, not red?"

"Blue. I'm certain of it."

"...Sunstreaker. And he's without his twin."

Heatseeker sneered triumphantly as Lockdown took a sharp intake through his vents. “Ah, you're familiar? Mech nearly took us out single-handedly, until I shot him in the back. He's still alive," she clarified as Lockdown narrowed his optics at her, "but he was severely injured. Knocked out, an easy picking. And I was the only one who survived and knows what his ship looks like.”

“Decepticon cargo ship, that was just in this sector? And you're the only one still online who saw him?”

“Yep, along with his itty-bitty--"

“Good.” 

Heatseeker’s smile evaporated as Lockdown transformed his arm into a cannon and aimed it right at her forehead.

“You...no, Lockdown, I’m worth more to you alive!”

“No, you’re worth more to me _silent._ Sunstreaker, though?”

The sound of the blast rang through the entire ship, making the creatures held in cages lining the walls flinch, some of them crying out fearfully as a dead frame smacked the ground.

“Sunstreaker is _priceless.”_


End file.
